Hi,
I'm considering upgrading to either Sid or Etch, as it seems like it would be cooler having bleeding edge applications. My major concerns however, is that I have read alot about Sid and Etch becoming very unstable in the upcoming months, due to a migration from gcc 3x to 4x. I am currently using Debian Sarge for a desktop and for development of php and mysql. The applications I use on a day to day basis are:
Kopete, Mozilla-Firefox, amarok, Mozilla-Thunderbird, Quanta, Konqueror, Kaffeine and others less occsasionaly such as Gimp and OpenOffice.
Would any of you suggest it is a good idea to upgrading at this current time then? Or would you suggest waiting till GCC has finished being updated. Will there be any gains apart from having the bleeding edge apps? And which would you suggest, etch or sid? Thanks,

Tom

Based on my personal experince, I can vouch for testing (i.e. etch).

The few apps that we both use (firefox, php, gimp) work flawlessly. The testing version of firefox is 1.0.4. You decide whether or not that's new enough

I noticed that apt upgraded to gcc-4.0 a while ago, and nothing broke.

On overall, testing is quite stable. I've had two instances of breakage(*) in the past 15 months (i.e. since I started using debian); none of them were so severe that I felt I had to find a workaround--waiting for an upgrade of the faulty package while using software that didn't depend on it did the trick. No data was harmed

In any case, with both etch and sid, you always have the option of pinning packages to more stable versions.

Also, I think it's easier to go from etch to sid than the other way around.

In conclusion:
Switch to etch now--it won't break anything--to try it out. If you want even newer versions of your apps, switch to sid later.

hth --Jonas

i also vote for etch as i have been using its start and it has been rock solid since then

but i upgraded my most used apps (e.g. firefox , ....) to sid

I installed Debian Sid yesterday and so far everything works ok. There are a few packages that won't install because of missing dependencies, but I didn't really need them.

Although Etch seemed a little "unstable" recently, it was nothing critical and I've had no problems with "testing" for a long, long time now...

I also had the gcc 4.0 update and there were no problems that I can see so far...

I was using "unstable" before Sarge become "stable" but now I've reverted to "testing" and it works fine for me..

If you install apt-listbugs, you should be quite safe. You'll always be warned of any bugs in packages when updating/installing and you can decide whether the bug report is serious enough not to upgrade/install.

I'm also curious about when to try out Etch. My main worry it the transition from XFree to Xorg. I'll probably wait for Etch to transition to Xorg and then do a clean install.

Or maybe I have some fundamental misunderstanding about what the "transition to Xorg" will mean to Debian?

I don't really see a problem with this because all you have to do is uninstall xfree86 and install xorg. They function the same although the config tools are slightly different.

Never used anything else but Sid and beside some small problems every now and then it's really stable. Even if there are problems they are mostly fixed within a couple of days.
Etch is the safe way to go I guess, but I just prefer the newer stuff in Sid. Give Etch a spin and see if it offers what you need. If so, no need to go to Sid and the possible problems.

I would wait on dist-upgrading to sid until these guys have said it works: http://lists.debian.org/debian-kde/2.../msg00089.html
I'm running sid and there's only a few kde based packages that I haven't upgraded recently though. Especially kdelibs-data has been troublesome for some as you can see in the mailing list threads, as it wants to install the 3.4.2 version even if the rest of kde is still 3.3.2.
The dist-upgrade where I got xorg instead of xfree was quite uneventful. It just asked which one I'd want and installed it removing xfree. Some qt packages needed to be changed to xorg related manually but otherwise it went fine.

Ok I'm going to make a backup of my filesystem and give testing a try. Thanks for your input, will tell you how it's gone once it's finished upgrading.

When making a decision, remember what the purpose of Sid is; It is for the developers who are working on upgrades. If you need your computer for important things, and cannot wait a few days if something breaks, you might want to stick with Etch. I have seen quite a few posts in these forums posted for help with Sid that go unanswered. It's not because no one want's to help, but Sid is a testing bed for a package development, not meant to be used as a standard OS.
I have been running Sarge for almost a year. Two weeks after it went stable, I changed my sources.list to testing and did a dist-upgrade. I have not had anything break in Etch. I do, however, have listbugs installed and pin updates that I feel might break my system.

Good luck!

Thanks, just finished upgrading! Everything seems to be ok, bar mysql which is broke, but I remember someone having the same problem before so I'm looking for what they did now...

I find the safe way to do it is to manually pick the packages to update.

I originally had a Sid system but when Sarge was going stable things got kinda crazy. Now I pin packages that might break things and open Synaptic and manually pick the packages I want to update.

Firefox is one I try to keep updated, right now the most updated version in sid is 1.0.6-3 which wants to install/upgrade a bunch of packages all of which have critical bugs. So I am still using 1.0.6-1.

I also have the Sarge backports, it seems to have some packages that are more up to date than sid. Like JAVA, is the version 1.5.0_04-b05 and sid is still 1.4.0.

I did upgrade Gnome to 2.10, but have not messed with KDE.

If you do not want to mess with bugs or things that might break your system just run a mixed system and update the packages you need.

Fixed mysql, switched from mysql-server to mysql-server-4.1 and it's working again. I read that xorg is available for sid and etch, but I can't seem to find it... is it only for unstable at the moment?

Yes, xorg hasn't made it to etch yet...