Safely running Debian/sid

Safely running Debian/sid

Posted Nov 8, 2007 8:58 UTC (Thu) by DeletedUser32991 ((unknown), #32991)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to (some) development distributions

Interesting idea to write the review without trying the other suggestions first.

When running a development distribution, care should be taken to be "in the loop" for knowing beforehand when an upgrade is going to break your stuff badly. For example, for Debian, you could use the following:

• Topic of the #debian-devel IRC channel, where the most awful breakages are announced.
• The packages apt-listbugs and apt-listchanges can be used to get information about bugs and changes (the news are more important than the changelog) introduced with a given upgrade and a chance to not upgrade if it sounds dangerous.

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Indeed apt-listbugs has saved me more than once when upgrading my sid and testing systems. I
would recommend installing it to anyone using these suites. Of course it requires a bit of
training to quickly judge from the bug report titles which ones are truly important and need a
closer look.