Debian Testing

[Tony Wasson]

> * When I ran apt-get dist-upgrade yesterday, there were no packages. The
> same thing today resulted in 400+ upgraded packages to install. Obviously
> the new "testing" branch has kicked in. Should I change my sources.list
> file to the stable branch, or is it safe/stable to leave it pointing at
> the testing branch?

"testing" packages have all critical bugs fixed and have been stable a few
days. I think testing just switched over to the 'sarge' (debian 3.1)
packages.

As a side note, Jay, you might like 'pinning' if you aren't using it
already. If you have stable and testing sources in sources.list, Debian will
grab the newest packages -- usually testing. Pinning will let you use stable
primarily and then testing if the package doesn't exist in stable. You can
also upgrade a package to testing or even unstable if you want some new fix
or function. I seem to recall der.hans mentioning something like this
before, but here goes....

NOTE: Pinning requires apt .5 or higher.

Make an /etc/apt/preferences file
  Package: *
  Pin: release a=testing
  Pin-Priority: 50
(The higher the pin-priority, the more like the release is to be chosen)

Make sure you have stable and testing sources in /etc/apt/sources.list.

To upgrade a package to the 'testing' branch, use this apt-get command.
# apt-get -t testing install packagename

http://www.mail-archive.com/eug-lug@efn.org/msg10229.html
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2002/1/mail

Tony