A constantly usable testing distribution for Debian

Posted Sep 22, 2010 21:43 UTC (Wed) by ms (subscriber, #41272)
Parent article: A constantly usable testing distribution for Debian

Weird - I've been using debian unstable for about 9 years now on all my desktops and some servers. I very rarely have any problems.

Now admittedly, my requirements are light - ratpoison, mutt, xterm, chrome (was firefox) and emacs are pretty much all I actually require, and I've only recently taken to running gnome in the background.

Given I have little experience of where these constantly breaking packages come from, can people enlighten me? What does break so frequently? - is it just the latest shiny stuff or have I just been very very lucky?

A constantly usable testing distribution for Debian

Posted Sep 22, 2010 22:31 UTC (Wed) by SiB (subscriber, #4048) [Link]

Once or twice a year I had to fix something on a text console after an upgrade. Only once ever I had to init=/bin/bash to recover from some breakage. I try to avoid an upgrade if I know I need the computer during the next few days. And I never upgrade all computers at once. So, Debian sid is pretty stable, from my point of view.

Agreed, unstable gives me very few problems

Posted Sep 30, 2010 7:05 UTC (Thu) by cypherpunks (guest, #1288) [Link]

And I've been using it on production servers since 2000. The biggest pain I remember is CUPS. It's still an opaque Windows-inspired piece of monolithic crap, and there have been month-long periods when new releases didn't work for mysterious undiagnosable reasons.

But other than that, I upgrade a few times a week and have only had a few glitches.

Bleeding-edge is "experimental". I've used packages from there occasionally.