The Grumpy Editor's guide to (some) development distributions

>Two hours prior to leaving to catch a plane to yet another conference, your editor decided to
do a "quick" update on the laptop system, which was running the Ubuntu development repository.
What followed was two highly focused hours with a rescue CD

And the moral of the story: do not make your test systems your regular systems. Install
multiple distros alongside each other on different partitions, or probably even better yet,
just use something like VMware.