[lug] Debian Testing

[rm at fabula.de]

On Wed, Jan 30, 2002 at 10:55:44AM -0700, Todd Ruskell wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I've been running Debian stable, aka Potato, since it came out.
> Contemplating a new video card supported only under XFree86 4.x, among
> other things are temping me to upgrade to testing, aka Woody, before it
> is "officially" released.  Have any of you Debian users been running
> Woody?  Any hitches I should be worried about?
> 
> Based on what I've seen on the web, the general sentiment seems to be
> that Woody is generally ok.  I'm hoping for a little more personal
> opinion based on experience.

I _DO_ run a rather 'testing' like server in a production environment.
I had my share of glitches, but only when i needed to upgrade individual
pakates (the upgrade to the latest postgresql database was a bit, err,
rough ... The package maintainer thought it would be a good idea do
display all database records during the upgrade. Not too much fun when
the system hold several million records and you do the upgrade remotely
on a slow dialin line :-/
My experience so far is that 'testing' is actually rather stable _iff_
you stay with often-used packages. Another thing to improve stability
of the overall system:  in my experience 'testing' or 'unstable' will
often fail to update (with dpkg or apt) because of wrong/to tight
dependencies (gnome packages are famous for that). On my servers i
switched to building the core components from source packages. This 
way i get both: rather stable applications and still get all the luxury
of package tracking/uninstallation etc.

 Ralf Mattes

> Thanks,
> 
> Todd
> 
> --
> Todd Ruskell, Ph.D.
> Lecturer in Physics
> Colorado School of Mines
> Golden, CO 80401
> 303-384-2080
> Fax: 303-273-3919
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Web Page:  http://lug.boulder.co.us
> Mailing List: http://lists.lug.boulder.co.us/mailman/listinfo/lug