Debain Stable - Can I treat it as a rolling release?
DebianThis forum is for the discussion of Debian Linux.
Notices
Welcome to LinuxQuestions.org, a friendly and active Linux Community.
You are currently viewing LQ as a guest. By joining our community you will have the ability to post topics, receive our newsletter, use the advanced search, subscribe to threads and access many other special features. Registration is quick, simple and absolutely free. Join our community today!
Note that registered members see fewer ads, and ContentLink is completely disabled once you log in.
If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us. If you need to reset your password, click here.
Having a problem logging in? Please visit this page to clear all LQ-related cookies.
Get a virtual cloud desktop with the Linux distro that you want in less than five minutes with Shells! With over 10 pre-installed distros to choose from, the worry-free installation life is here! Whether you are a digital nomad or just looking for flexibility, Shells can put your Linux machine on the device that you want to use.
Exclusive for LQ members, get up to 45% off per month. Click here for more info.
When the 'stable' repo is pointed to Jessie (edit: at the next release date), your next dist-upgrade will indeed update you to Jessie.
This may not be a good thing to do without some preparation or consideration of the consequences of all of the changes involved.
There may also be some manual steps required as it is likely to involve some major changes (systemd).
e.g. the Lenny to Squeeze dist-upgrade required updating the kernel and apt first, then rebooting before completing the upgrade - doing this as an automated or 'surprise upgrade' would result in a broken system.
Last edited by descendant_command; 03-16-2014 at 07:52 AM.
Distribution: Debian Wheezy, Jessie, Sid/Experimental, playing with LFS.
Posts: 2,900
Rep:
Rolling release means it is constantly upgrading, not upgrading 2 years after initial install. So the answer to your written question is no.
Having said that it seems your questions is actually quite different to what you have written regarding "rolling release". If you leave your sources list pointing to stable, not wheezy or jessie but stable, then when jessie is released as stable you will have the opportunity to upgrade from wheezy (becomes oldstable) to jessie (becomes stable).
As pointed out by descendant command this can cause problems so you will need to be sure you have backups of any custom changes or simply do a clean install.
Unless you have a compelling reason for using stable (e.g. a mission-critical server) you might want to consider moving to Testing (Jessie) which is truly a rolling release.
jdk
If you want a Debian rolling release, track unstable (sid). In my experience it's actually more stable than tracking testing. And don't let anyone talk you into apt-pinning or backports.
Debain Stable - Can I treat it as a rolling release?
Actually rolling release is a release which is constantly upgraded in their packages' versions.
Debian Stable get updates for bug/security fixes only. Hence no version upgrade happens in it.
What you say is just you are always tracking stable release, not rolling release.
So in your way you will only get Debian Stable. (Even after converting to Future Jessie which would also be a stable version).
You can only get true rolling release when you would go for Debian Unstable, in which packages are continuously upgraded, and not after years.
Well, the update rate does slow down, but they don't stop, and they pick back up after the freeze. Call it what you will, but the effect is a rolling release. And I agree with JWJones, Sid is less problematic than Testing. Testing can break for days or weeks, but the few breakages I've had with Sid have been fixed in days, never as much as a week. And Testing is certainly not a rolling release, as someone above said.
Distribution: Debian Sid AMD64, Raspbian Wheezy, various VMs
Posts: 7,680
Rep:
I moved to Sid from Testing due to packages I wanted to use being missing from Testing for a while. Sid has had problems with breakages with multilib but other than that I haven't seen a problem that holding off on a dist-upgrade wouldn't prevent.
of course I wouldn't run a production server on Sid but for a desktop that I can bear to spend an hour on reinstalling (as a last resort) I think it's a better proposition than using the older packages Stable uses or having packages missing like Testing.
I can never find it when I googlle but I did read something on the Debian site saying that the order the writer would choose to use versions was Stable, then Unstable, then Testing.
LinuxQuestions.org is looking for people interested in writing
Editorials, Articles, Reviews, and more. If you'd like to contribute
content, let us know.