[Nottingham] Living with Sid

[Michael Leuty]

I had some excellent advice from one of the gurus I spoke to at the 
Awareness Day (you know who you are!) who suggested that Debian stable 
is watched over by the security team, and unstable is watched over by 
the original developers and the package maintainers, but packages in 
testing are somewhat in limbo. He therefore suggested that servers 
ought to be running stable (woody) and desktops ought to run unstable 
(sid). He even went so far as to suggest that unstable was no more 
unstable than a distro like Red Hat.

I have duly updated my box at home (originally Libranet) to sid, and I 
have to report that I have had not problems at all. Au contraire, I 
find that Kpilot is working properly for the first time ever (on any 
distro that I have tried). All is well and I am a happy camper.

But I understand that things occasionally go wrong with sid, though 
things are soon patched up again. It seems to me that if I do frequent 
dist-upgrades then I am likely to run into a problem sooner or later. 
It might be sensible to do dist-upgrades at fairly lengthy intervals, 
but to repeat them a few days later if things get broken.

Does this sound like a reasonable strategy, and if so what would be a 
sensible frequency for dist-upgrades with sid?

Mike

-- 
Michael Leuty <mike at leuty.net>