I regret updating to Debian Testing

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tramp
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Re: I regret updating to Debian Testing

Post by tramp »

There is a good place for KDE users to get information about the state of the transition into debian/sid.
Note that testing is usually one week delayed behind debian/unstable, which is the source here, so if you use testing, you could prepare yourself to know when you better not upgrade your system for some month.
http://forum.siduction.org/index.php?PH ... board=22.0
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tramp
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Re: I regret updating to Debian Testing

Post by tramp »

falkTX wrote:I've seen that before, those people must be crazy to allow their system to break like that...
Oh, I'm one of them, . .
falkTX wrote:But anyway, I'm a little disappointed with KDE5.
Surely, it's almost ever a missile when such stuff changed, I mean, it's like driving a Car, when all the controls change during drive, . . . oh, oh, shit.
However, as you said already, there is no way to stop it, other then fall back in the past.
Hopefully KDE6 wont arrive before KDE5 is ready to be used. :lol:
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English Guy
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Re: I regret updating to Debian Testing

Post by English Guy »

While I am grateful to all the work that goes into testing, I always avoid bleeding edge distros. They are for people who want to play with the OS itself rather than just be productive on it, which is what I want.
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Re: I regret updating to Debian Testing

Post by emarsk »

tramp wrote:
falkTX wrote:I've seen that before, those people must be crazy to allow their system to break like that...
Oh, I'm one of them, . .
I 've been another one for years, until I switched to Funtoo (so, even crazier, I suppose).

My experience is that Debian Unstable is far more usable than Debian Testing.
In Testing, there are some times when the packages are in a messy mix of new and old, conflicting versions and unmet dependencies, because the distro is only half-rolling, and when something breaks it takes some time to get fixed. Sid, on the other hand, is a truly rolling distro, so you generally have the latest (or almost) of everything, which means that the software itself can be untested, but you usually don't have broken dependencies, and when something breaks it usually gets fixed quickly.
As with every rolling distro, you MUST inspect every upgrade of course. I think using apitude interactively is the best for this, and the Siduction and Aptosid forums can be helpful in the rough times (but I rarely needed to go there, honestly).
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Re: I regret updating to Debian Testing

Post by folderol »

I got bitten by that in the days of sarge and ended up with a completely borked machine. The only answer was wipe & re-install which was not so easy in those days. Now I won't touch testing until it's well down the line - almost about to become the new stable.
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Re: I regret updating to Debian Testing

Post by GMaq »

Hi,

As falkTX mentioned for me moving to Debian testing from an ultra-conservative base like old-oldstable has been quite a jump and a rough ride, however I have learned to be patient like tramp says and let things work through the system, if an update is going to be really messy and you have a working system just don't update at that particular moment... Basically jumping from working snapshot to working snapshot and hoping for the best is as good as it's going to get ... :roll:

I've found "Systemback" to be a very valuable tool, it doesn't 'officially' support Debian Testing but it does work perfectly. It's very easy to create a bootable image backup of your system and roll back to a working snapshot if things do go really bad.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/systemback/

Also apt-pinning is a good way to break-proof parts of your system if you use Debian testing, for instance I personally use Ardour builds with WindowsVST support for production, since this is a juggling act with Ardour itself and Wine I simply hold the 'known-working' versions in Synaptic so they don't get updated, if the held packages present dependency problems down the line then I need to evaluate how badly I actually need the updates. I think one problem is that people think because Testing is fairly bleeding-edge that you need to constantly update, but there are no rules or anything preventing you from simply working with a frozen functional snapshot for as long as you want, you are still using a package base much newer than Debian Stable after all.

Lastly another valuable resource is snapshot.debian.org which is an archive of packages that have been updated, for instance I recently had an update from Debian testing of libsigc++ which had a broken development header and completely broke my ability to compile Ardour, there is no way to go back within Debian Testing itself, so I just went to the snapshots archive and downloaded and installed the previous working version from there..

http://snapshot.debian.org/

Anyway, just some thoughts from a neophyte getting used to using Debian Testing..
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