[Glastonbury] General purpose/must have packages

[tim hall]

Last Thursday 16 December 2004 08:06, Greg Browne was like:
> sources.list edited as suggested - I think I have downloaded 48
> packages and with the upgrade, 620 upgraded, 17 newly installed, 4 to
> remove and 10 not upgraded getting 481MB of archives!
> If this slides back into vanilla debain then I assume that there will
> come a time when I'll need to reinstall from a KANOTIX disk or am I
> missing the point?

Um, I dunno about that. It all depends what you want to achieve. If you use a 
lot of mixed sources without due care and attention, you will end up with a 
Debian Sid system. By the time you've got that far, the idea of RE_installing 
will seem insane. You can downgrade, but it can get complicated. If 
apt-pinning was as reliable as it's supposed to be then you could probably 
pin to KANOTIX sources and get away with it.

My advice is this:
When you want to do a System Upgrade, comment out _everything_ apart from your 
KANOTIX source(s). Basically only uncomment other sources if KANOTIX does not 
contain the package you need at the time and only to install that package. 
Are you absolutely _sure_ you need Debian experimental sources?

I know how tempting it is to run a wild mixed system, I've done it. By and 
large it's worth trusting that the distro maintainer knows what they're doing 
and going with what they recommend to begin with. It will cause you much less 
headaches in the long run.

Good luck & have fun.

cheers

tim hall
http://glastonburymusic.org.uk