[SlugLUG] Help Me Choose

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Rohan Sheth (ronashet at ucsc.edu):

> Ah thanks for the message, the verbosity helped quite a bit.  So Debian
> Unstable sounds like quite the plan,  now I need to go abouts actually
> getting it.  Should I install testing and dist-upgrade to unstable or
> install stable and upgrade to unstable?  I image there is not much
> difference in the two...I'm just asking.

There is not much difference between the two.  The Testing branch is
automatically populated each night by a quarantining script that
determines whether newly uploaded/released packages in Unstable have 
met certain canned quality criteria.  

See:  "Testing FAQ" on http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Debian/  (slightly
outdated, but gives the general picture)

Please note that, becuase those criteria are applied on a per-package
level, dependency hairballs^W^W suites of closely related packages 
such as KDE and GNOME are at some times not entirely installable, in
toto, on the Testing branch -- but that such problems, along with others
such as some shortfalls in Debian Security Team coverage, can be fixed
by making Unstable branch packages accessible upon request.

Here's one way to do it:

:r /etc/apt/sources.list

deb ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free
deb ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main non-free contrib
deb http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib non-free

:r /etc/apt/preferences

Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 50

This uses a trick of Debian package-handling called "pin priority",
where the standard, normal package priority level is defined to be 100.
Setting the "Unstable" packages to a sub-normal level of priority while
adding that branch's lines alongside the "Testing" ones results in a
situation where _only_ Testing packages will be retrieved, except when
you specifically ask for one from the other branch, like this:

# apt-get  -t unstable  install [packagename]