[vox-tech] debian questions - packages under testing / unstable

[Troy Arnold]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 09:33:46PM -0800, Ted Deppner wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 11:40:29PM -0500, Mike Simons wrote:
> 
> I followed woody when it was testing, and even without a libc6 major
> version it was at times hairy.  Managalbe and fun, but hairy.  I enjoyed
> solving the problems raised, but it takes precious time.
> 
> >   I agree caution is a good thing... but people who don't want to hurt 
> > every now and then should not be updating a testing system right now.
> 
> The issue to me is that RedHat gets absolutely lambasted for their use of
> beta/alpha libc6's and here with debian testing we have the exact same
> situation... except not only is this libc6 bug prone it is also
> incompatable with the previous version, meaning your entire installed
> binary set could well have bugs and problems due to that version
> inconsistency during testing process.

Well, RedHat released gcc- '2.96', a Redhat specific version guaranteed to be
incompatible with any other vendors libc6.  Debian's 2.95 libc and 3.2 libc
*are* binary compatible with other vendors.  That's very important to people
like myself that run binary-only stuff like opera-static.

> 
> It's a mess I don't want to deal with even on my home test system.  Once
> they reach a critical mass of packages this will be a managable problem,
> but I think that's a ways off. 

I'm still a Debian noob, but i'll check in anyway.  My 'testing' box has
been up since the day i installed it two months ago, with very few
issues requiring much thought to resolve.  I read about the new libc6
for testing and waited a few days to see what problems might come up,
then i upgraded.  No problems since, although it was necessary to
rebuild MySQL and PHP (two packages that i prefer to build from source
anyway.)  This system does not do any desktop duties, so i wouldn't be
aware of any X weirdness.

Both my desktop and laptop are running Sid.  That hasn't been so smooth, but
then I wouldn't be up to speed on Debian if I didn't have occasional things to
fix.

So despite the fact that i'm new to Debian and apparently picked a rough time
to transition, I've found all upgrade paths to be pretty painless.  My desktop
has gone from stable->testing->unstable with the worst inconvenience being the
occasional unavailability of certain packages.  Pretty cool!

-troy

P.S.
I think anyone running testing/unstable needs to subscribe to
debian-devel-announce.