[Nottingham] Living with Sid

[Simon Huggins]

On Thu, Nov 06, 2003 at 05:13:00PM +0000, Michael Leuty wrote:
> 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.

Ha!  Redhat releases go through QA processes before they are released.
I'd compare them to Debian stable in terms of stability.

I really really really wish people would stop advocating others to run
unstable.

Unstable can break.  If unstable breaks and eats your data you get
exactly what you deserve.  If you run unstable and you're not very
familiar with Debian and Debian ways of fixing problems then you get
exactly what you deserve.

Do you know what you'd do if you grab an unstable dpkg or apt which
broke?  Or if you grabbed a libc which broke?

If security is so important to you that you don't want to run testing,
why is reliability of so little importance?

> 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.

If it's a normal package you can probably just rollback to the old
version which did work.  If it's libc or dpkg then you'll have less luck
and might have to play games to get your system back.

You can play with pinning or snapshot.debian.net to roll a system back
too.

If you really must run unstable then consider being on debian-devel and
at certainly debian-devel-announce.  Also consider hanging out on IRC in
#debian on freenode and reading apt's news (the ircbot) and the topic
there regularly so that if there are issues that others see they don't
hit you.

I don't know about your comptencies but if any of this scares you then
please consider not running unstable.

People who advocate running unstable just end up giving Debian a bad
name when their friends end up with a broken system and a lack of clue
about how to fix it.

Sorry if that wasn't what you wanted to hear.

Simon.

-- 
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