Unstable users: how frequently do you update?

annadane · 06-13-2018, 10:01 PM

Title.

frankbell · 06-13-2018, 10:37 PM

I'm not using Sid right now, but, when I did, I would check for updates every two or three days, and generally find a bunch of them. Of course, I did have multiple desktops installed . . . .

jim_p · 06-13-2018, 11:32 PM

I check for updates 5+ times a day, whenever I turn on my pc that is :P
I upgrade whenever there is an uppgrade and I dist-upgrade only when the package(s) to be installed do not remove any already installed package(s).

Same for my testing installation.

annadane · 06-13-2018, 11:55 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jim_p

I check for updates 5+ times a day, whenever I turn on my pc that is :P
I upgrade whenever there is an uppgrade and I dist-upgrade only when the package(s) to be installed do not remove any already installed package(s).

Same for my testing installation.

Yes, but sometimes you have to wait for transitions.

widget · 06-19-2018, 08:47 PM

I run my update/upgrade chores once a day on all my installs.

You are going to have problems doing so more than 4 times a day. Debian updates the servers every 6 hours. Don't know what time they do that and have never worried about it. But if you wanted I am sure you could figure out what time your mirror was updated and then plan around that.

I will, if starting early and running into the night, do it toward the end of the session. Primarily as a break from whatever I have been doing.

But I have a number of installs on various drives connected to this box and do most of this in chroot. If you are running Sid as your only install I would go for once a day as this will keep the number of packages about as low as you can hope for.

More than that is not needed. Keep in mind that Ubuntu bases its LTS releases on Debian Testing. Their regular releases are based on Sid.

In my experience Sid is as stable or more so than most Ubuntu LTS releases.

That said you do need to watch what is going on. It is easy to get lulled into inattention using Debian unstable. The main difference between Sid and Testing is that testing is not supposed to have any package upgrades that will stop the system from booting to the desktop. This is not true for Sid. You can get some really wonky packages. Usually seems to happen about once in a dev cycle. This is not very often but you need to watch for it.

You can usually tell by just watching for packages that will be removed. If you see that your DE, xorg or something similar don't do it. Usually this is cleaned up within 48 hours if not less.

If using Synaptic for your chores then make sure the output is through a terminal window (in preferences for Synaptic).