* Oliver Jones <oliver(a)deeperdesign.com> [2005-09-16 15:50]:
if going all the way to unstable is advisable.
No. unstable is for people who like having their machine broken when they upgrade packages. It doesn’t happen constantly, but often enough. Even testing is debatable; on a server I would *always* stick to stable, but for a desktop you can only pick between two evils. There are two other choices: Backports: Look for small focussed repositories that provide packages not in the base system. Last I tried this, the large repositories were more or less mutually exclusive, as dependencies on their packages led to conflicts. Source builds: You could try pinning to stable and adding testing and unstable only to use them for source builds. It’s a bit more work, but that way you can avoid importing dependencies on testing/unstable package versions that expand until they fill all available room.
What are the security patch repercussions?
You only get them for stable. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>