For those of you who have spent a considerable amount of time on Sid or Etch, how do you decide what you will upgrade and what you will not? I know that the long-term answer lies in becoming familiar with the libraries. However, I am not-so-much and when on Sarge, it wasn't a question.

Any advice on what I can to become more familiar with the libraries or is there any kind of research that you suggest I do before going forward with the change?

I have been on Etch now for a little over a month and run Fluxbox, so I'm not referring to the enormous KDE updates.

Any help or advice is greatly appreciated.

@lilohatea

As you already say it is a matter of getting familiar with the system and how it works if you a book buying type then I would suggest The Debian System by Martin F. Kraft as a good purchase. For getting to know on your own I would suggest either subscribing to or reading through an email gateway like Gmame the debian-user, debian-devel mailing lists at http://lists.debian.org. For must have packages I would install apt-listchanges and apt-listbugs to be able to read the changelogs and bug reports respectively you may also want apt-file if you do any compiling from source. Other than this just generally reading anything you can find in searches on problems you encounter is a good way to go. You may also want to search online or install the package rutebook to read on your machine the Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition.

Thanks, HappyTux! That was exactly what I was looking for. I picked up the book last week and will take your advice on the commands and mailing lists.