aaditya_bagga wrote:Because I am a new Sid user and like to know beforehand if a upgrade will break my system or not?
A Sid user
wouldn't need to know beforehand as in "being told by others", because he would find it out for himself either by just trying everything fear-free and fixing whatever breaks precisely for the purpose of, guess what, testing packages and learning stuff while fixing bugs, or by being on his own very well documented and prepared to every potential breakage.
aaditya_bagga wrote:Also, for explaining things like apt-listbugs and reportbug (tips).
What's there to be explained? Tips about reporting bugs?
Reading bug reports when apt-listbugs reports them during upgrades (or even beforehand by actually
knowing what one is doing when running Sid) does not require any explaining (you know, there's plenty of documentation about it). As for reporting bugs, there is nothing that cannot be answered, again, just by reading the documentation, which is something that a Sid user does
before asking for help or waiting for the
timely advise to be posted in some forum thread.
aaditya_bagga wrote:http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debia ... osing.html
If you are a desktop user with some experience in Linux and does not mind facing the odd bug now and then, use unstable. It has all the latest and greatest software, and bugs are usually fixed swiftly.
I belong to this category.
Of course you do.
There are many unfortunate description of what development branches of debian are for.
In my opinion the worst are
on the very release description page on debian.org.
I believe that the author(s) of description such as those were just a bit too naively trustful about users not venturing into development branches without being fully aware of what it really entails.
Luckily there still are a few descriptions that tell the story like it is, rather than misleading users to believe they belong to any development branch for such trivial reasons as having "the latest and greatest software" (which, by the way, is not even the latest and greatest).
For instance, from:
http://www.debian.org/releases/sid/ we can read:
"sid" is subject to massive changes and in-place library updates. This can result in a very "unstable" system which contains packages that cannot be installed due to missing libraries, dependencies that cannot be fulfilled etc. Use it at your own risk!
or on
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianUnstable we find:
The most important thing is to keep in mind that you are participating in the development of Debian when you are tracking testing or unstable. This means that you should know your way around Linux, Debian and the Debian packaging system and that you should have an interest in tracking down and fixing bugs.
But then again unfortunately these more appropriate descriptions are largely overlooked when "the latest and greatest" is promised to the "user with
some experience".
You know, some time ago, way before you posted this question, I was thinking about proposing something
just apparently very similar. A thread about development branches that could collect and coordinate efforts of those who track testing/unstable branches in order to be more efficient and quick in reporting bugs, especially those that we just live with for whatever reason.
But then I gave up the idea because I realized that such discussion might have easily been mistaken for something like what you are proposing here, which is nothing but establishing a place where users that do not belong to testing and development branches can get guilt-free support for their misguided attempt at running, for all the wrong reasons, anything but stable.