Whoops! Included a spurious i in Johm Quarterman's name. Sorry, John!

That result is very suspicious !

Why is not kaOS included ???

http://kaosx.us/

OK fair enough: I am completely wrong about that -- thank you for correcting me.

I am no "guru" by any stretch of the imagination, I just (wrongly) thought I was offering good advice.

1 members found this post helpful.

Hmm, I would still argue (and be interested in cynwulf's thought on that) that if you decide to run Debian unstable for an extended period of time and do too much pinning (whatever too much may be) you would eventually run into dependency problems.
If you do this for long enough you would end up with a system where some packages would correspond to stable (or even older), some to testing and some to sid, which is not something you would typically recommend to an average user.

On the other hand this scenario is not directly related to running sid but rather to the fact of having your sources pointed to a dynamic target such as stable/testing/unstable rather than to an explicit release such as wheezy...

Does that make sense?

Ah, if only people would take the time to digest what they read. All Arch upgrades are partial upgrades - that's what rolling releases do. As the linked-to wiki entry makes clear, you should not upgrade an individual package (by using the pacman -y option to refresh your copy of the package list) as this could lead to instability.

As I posted earlier. I once (in my early days of using Arch) made the mistake of running a very major upgrade, without referring to the notes telling me what to do first, and had to spend a considerable amount of time to get out of the hole I had dug for myself. Apart from that I've not had stability problems with my repeated partial upgrades made using the standard pacman -Suy. Far fewer problems than people encounter with a full upgrade from version x of a distribution to all-new version y

Obviously. legitimate apt pinning - e.g. putting a buggy package on hold until a fix is uploaded to unstable - can only be a temporary solution. It's not for someone who says "I want to always run xorg version X because it works with legacy proprietary video driver Y". That plan is doomed...

You can usually still upgrade where possible, i.e. by running upgrade as opposed to dist-upgrade, but eventually the nature of testing/unstable is that it will have to move on.

Absolutely not, but you wouldn't recommend that the average user run the testing or unstable branches either.
Pointing your sources to testing or unstable makes sense. Pointing to stable does not. Doing the latter leads to unplanned upgrades - and who wants that?

JUST SAY NO TO APT-PINNING! If you are already running sid, why?

http://slartie.com/issue_0007/slarti...7.html#topic01

(Full disclosure: I ran Debian for years, but I no longer use Debian at all.)

What is your distro?

I use Slackware and OpenBSD. Professionally (as in, it pays the bills), I use Mac OSX.

Yes the article rings very true (despite being a little over the top).

It does not apply in this case however as the apt pinning being discussed is specifically not about mixing stable and testing/unstable.

apt pinning is commonly deployed on a mixed testing/unstable system, you can get away with it and in many cases it's safer, in combination with apt-listbugs, than just running testing or unstable and blindly running dist-upgrade. It's still messy however and requires continuous hands on maintenance.

The safest and most prudent option is to run stable and just install backports (or build your own backports) of any newer software required. For living dangerously on the bleeding edge, Debian is the wrong distro.
Same here.

Interesting, I agree on not using Arch for (public facing) servers, but he misses the point a little in his other criticism of Arch. Many of us use and love Arch because it is up-to-date and pretty stable - we don't use the testing repos. The point that he made about testing for Debian is well taken, but why assume that Arch users all use testing on Arch? Using core, extra and community provides a pretty solid system.

From the Arch Wik:
"core has fairly strict quality requirements. Developers/users need to signoff on updates before package updates are accepted."
"extra contains all packages that do not fit in core. Example: Xorg, window managers, web browsers . . ."
"community contains packages that have been adopted by Trusted Users from the Arch User Repository. Some of these packages may eventually make the transition to the core or extra repositories as the developers consider them crucial to the distribution. "

Additionally, like many Arch users, I occasionally need to use a package from the AUR (Arch User Repository). While some of these are built from source many - such as the files needed by my Epson printer - are taken from existing packages from other distros (such as Debian) and are repackaged at installation time.

Have manners and answer: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ml#post5315028

Voting ended on February 3rd, the polls are closed.

@gor0, it's not included because the first time it was suggested was a full week after the polls closed.

--jeremy