5 ms·

Since all of this is happening, properly, in the unstable and testing repos, stable is not affected. For some reason, a lot of people ignore the warnings http

• bgribble 2y ago
  I have used unstable as my daily driver since they named it "unstable", which I don't even remember what that was but at least 20 years ago. I have never (yet!) gotten myself into any trouble, by following a very simple principle: if aptitude (dselect back in the day) wants to remove or hold more than a handful of packages, STOP. Undo what you just did, and instead of a bulk upgrade go through marking one package at a time for upgrade. When you hit one that needs major changes, if you can't find an upgrade alternative that is sensible, leave it un-upgraded and try again in a few days. This time upgrade has been one of the more challenging ones to track in unstable, but patience and actually reading the reasons that dpkg reports for why it wants to do something has gotten me through it.
  • neilv 2y ago
    Back when I was running Debian `unstable` (Sid?), I was always slightly nervous that an update could make the system unbootable, or otherwise ruin my day, when I had other things to do. So I wrote a lighthearted theme song for `unstable` updates. I don't recall most of it offhand, but it was to the tune of "Cat's in the Cradle": o/~ What I'd really like now is to update your libc. See you later, can you apt-get please? At some point, Linux software stopped improving so quickly, and Debian Stable seemed better. And I've been very happy with it, for most all startup and personal purposes.
    • Grimeton 2y ago
      (S)id (I)s (D)angerous
      • marcosdumay 2y ago
        It's even named after the movie's villain.
• bayindirh 2y ago
  I'm using testing for the last decade, and it's pretty solid. Testing received the bulk of the "-t64" packages last week (~1.200), and the update went pretty smoothly. Testing and unstable requires a bit more experience to drive daily, but neither of them just collapses into a pile of smoking ash with an update. They're pretty stable and usable. I didn't reinstall any testing systems since I started using them. The only thing about Testing and unstable is: "None of them receives security updates. They are not intended for internet facing production systems".
  • binkHN 2y ago
    Did you just run apt update && apt full-upgrade and all went well?
    • okl 2y ago
      For me, aptitude showed a bunch of conflicts but when I selected all the required -t64 ones manually, they disappeared. Guess the algorithm is not so great at resolving the changes seamlessly. Hope that changes until the packets move to stable.
    • bayindirh 2y ago
      It removed the Bluetooth stack once, because I didn't look at the packages being removed. Other than that, other two big upgrades (~350 & ~550 packages each) went smoothly. It removes tons of libraries and installs "t64" versions, so small glitches like this is expected in testing. Stable will iron out all of them.
      • binkHN 2y ago
        Yeah, I noticed these t64 versions. Do you know if these t64 versions will forever have t64 in the package name? Or will they, one day, revert to their previous package names with the t64 removed?
        • seba_dos1 2y ago
          I'd expect packages to drop the suffix at their next ABI version bump, which changes the package name anyway.