[conspire] Fwd: wheezy is OUT. tonight. Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: BAD meeting for 2013-05 (and mini-installfests, and ...)

[Nick Moffitt]

Rick Moen:
> Quoting Tony Godshall (togo at of.net):
> 
> > OTOH, if you were pointed at stable, suddenly your apt-get update
> > brings in a whole lot of changes
> 
> Yep.  But you knew that's what it said on the tin when you decided to
> use a release distribution, instead of a rolling one.
[...]
> > If you track stable, you are presumably averse to uncontrolled
> > breakage, and you might be well advised to point by name or by
> > version number....
> 
> Arrgh.
> 
> God.  Dammit.  _Again?_
> 
> Do I have to rebut this bit of bad advice _every single time_ Debian
> has a release or even when people talk about Debian releases?
> 
> I guess I need to finally get around to FAQing it, because I'm really
> sick of having to debunk this stupid bullshit idea.

Historically you advised extra caution when making large jumps in
package sets, e.g:

http://linuxmafia.com/debian/tips (admittedly dated 1999):
> -- In order to upgrade crucial packages first, do:
>    "apt-get install perl libc6 dpkg apt apt-utils debconf"  
>    Whenever you're switching to a new development track, or are 
>    for any reason expecting a major jump in package versions, the 
>    foregoing command is a worthwhile precaution.

Ubuntu includes a do-release-upgrade command that tries to intelligently
prevent chicken-and-egg situations when going from one release to
a set of supported subsequent releases.  It contains some general logic
for the above package system runtime dependencies, as well as
hand-written rules to catch gotchas specific to a particular upgrade.
There are systems dedicated to running non-stop release upgrades,
logging problems that Ubuntu users might encounter.

I think that FAQing this along with some history would be especially
helpful, as I'm still ritually doing the perl/libc/dpkg dance when
jumping between stable releases of Debian.

But of course I get the sense that most Debian Developers rarely use
stable itself, and that makes testing rather more compelling if you can
support it.

-- 
"If you carefully examine the intercal package (which
was not available for a month despite emails about it
being a 404), you will discover that . is in ESR's
PATH."   -- Joey Hess