Anybody experienced with Sidux?

[Dale Farnsworth]

Jim wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 8:27 AM, Ben Browning <benb at bensbrowning.com> wrote:
> > You can have both repos but it won't do you much good as anything that has
> > changed in Sid will get overwritten and anything that hasn't changed since
> > Stable will be the same version in both places.
> 
> Sure, that's understood.  I just want to make sure that anything that
> isn't in the Sid repos because it hasn't been MADE unstable (due to
> being "tried and true) will still be accessible.

I think there's a misconception here.  All of the "tried and true"
programs in stable are already contained in testing and unstable.

In fact, each new stable release starts life identical to the testing
release at that time.  Then changes go into testing and cause it to
diverge over time from stable.

The only time that a package exists in stable but not in testing
or unstable is when the package needs modification to operate with
the new library versions and there is no maintainer to do the mods.

I'd recommend that you use testing, unless you have a specific reason
for using unstable (sid).  With testing, there is less churn and less
likelihood of packages needing manual fixups or not installing cleanly
for a time.  If I need a later version of a package than is in testing,
I install that package version by hand.

I just checked and I only have one machine running sid currently.
The others (5 or 6) are running lenny, which is the current testing.
I specify lenny in /etc/apt/sources.list rather than testing because
I have found that sometimes after a new stable release, the new
testing is a bit unstable because of the flood of updates.  After
things settle down a bit, I update the sources.list to specify the
new testing and then run "apt-get upgrade; apt-get dist-upgrade".

I haven't used Ubuntu enough to compare.  I migrated my wife's
desktop from WinXP to Ubuntu-8.10 a couple of months ago and
she hasn't complained, but I haven't used it in day-to-day
operation myself.

-Dale