Debian User Forums

Hi!
Can we have a ticky for people using Sid, it could have upgrade warnings, tips and tricks, and the experiences of users.
Give your opinions.

I thought Sid is for people who know what they are doing. Why would they need a sticky providing information they already know?

Sid IS for people who know what they are doing. But since there's no easy answer to to a lot of different issues it will be helpful for Sid users if there was a sub-forum specifically aimed at Sid, and the problems that pops up from time to time instead of having to drop ones question in any of the other sub-forums already in existence.

In my opinion having a Sid-specific forum will only mean, that people would start thinking more than once about upgrading their boxes to Sid/Experimental distro. Not that I know for sure, but fixing errors in Sid take some extensive knowledge about both Debian and Linux itself.

Having that Sid sub-forum will also have the ability to show Debian users how packages are shifted downwards towards Stable releases, from unstable over testing to stable. From what I can tell it'll also paint a clear picture of just WHY stable has the name "Stable" - It could help people understand Debian a bit deeper, a bit sooner.

/Jimmy

Because I am a new Sid user and like to know beforehand if a upgrade will break my system or not?

Also, for explaining things like apt-listbugs and reportbug (tips).

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.

I would say topics related to sid more or less are related to 'development'. Though my opinions are my own.

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.

Thank you, mor. It's about time someone cleared up those issues.

aaditya_bagga wrote:Hi!
Can we have a ticky for people using Sid, it could have upgrade warnings, tips and tricks, and the experiences of users.
Give your opinions.

There is already a section for sid-users, but it comes camouflaged:
http://forums.debian.net/viewforum.php?f=30

Thank you @vbrummond, I will look into the development section.

Hi.

Perhaps some information in http://manual.aptosid.com/en/sys-admin-apt-en.htm may be what is desired. That site is devoted to running sid, however, it is different from this forum. As usual, you get to choose.

Upgrade of an Installed System - dist-upgrade - Overview

If the whole system is to be upgraded this is achieved through a dist-upgrade. You should always check Current Warnings on the aptosid main web site, and check the warnings against the packages that your system wants to dist-upgrade. If you need to hold a package refer to Downgrade and Hold a package

An 'upgrade' only of 'debian sid' is not recommended.
Frequency of a dist-upgrade

dist-upgrade as routinely as you can, ideally once every week or two, at least 1 time per month to be safe. ...

and more at the URL mentioned above, the manual as well as other pages.

Best wishes ... cheers, drl

Thank You @drl
Both for your help and the link

(but yes, I know about distributions derived from Sid. )

I'm late for this parade as it looks like it's be hashed out already.
Besides, mor posted most of the relevant issues above.
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php? ... 81#p515521

My take on this is it sounds good in theory to have a sid subsection.
But it also sounded good ( in theory ) to add the gerber section.

that's all for me today....

I agree that Sid is for people who know what they are doing. But then again, there has to be a first time for everything

ew-linux wrote:I agree that Sid is for people who know what they are doing. But then again, there has to be a first time for everything

I'd qualify that further and say that sid (and testing) are for people who want to know what they are doing (and how it works and why it doesn't).

dilberts_left_nut wrote:

ew-linux wrote:I agree that Sid is for people who know what they are doing. But then again, there has to be a first time for everything

I'd qualify that further and say that sid (and testing) are for people who want to know what they are doing (and how it works and why it doesn't).

I agree with you. That was the category I was in when I started out trying Sid. Now I'm past that stage, but I haven't forgotten how it was to be very eager and impatient to advance in linux... It's better that people wants to learn, instead of staying at stable, where there is no challenge after a week or two. Debian is very conservative, and stable in Debian means very very stable. It isn't anything you learn from. Messing up installs and configurations, that is where the true learning is. As long as people have good backup-routines and don't risk important data and stuff, then I say, go ahead. Try Sid.

But if a newbie reads this. Have a stable install as your main system. Then do a second install on another partition that you can play with. If you bork that install, no problem. Wipe it, and reinstall on the same partition, and have a new go. Your main install is always there...

there's plenty of ways to borkup a dual boot system from either install.
stay in this forum long enough and you'll read most of them at least twice,
and only twice if you're one of the lucky ones.

llivv wrote:there's plenty of ways to borkup a dual boot system from either install.
stay in this forum long enough and you'll read most of them at least twice,
and only twice if you're one of the lucky ones.

I'm sure there is, but I have never managed to do that myself. And I'm always multibooting lots of distros. Each distro gets just 30 GB with me, and they share a huge data-partition which also serves as a backup-disk. Sure, you can mess up the boot of your main system, and you could find a way to format the partition where your main system resides.Things like that. But then again, if you think like that, then you can't do anything. Just make sure to have backup-routines that are so good that it never is a big deal if everything is lost. Because it's also possible get a harddisk-failure at some time.

Good backup-routines are always essential for worry-free computing, and obviously even more important when playing with Sid. The best thing for a newbie would obviously be to find an old second laptop which they dedicate to all sorts of experiments. That way they can avoid taking it to their main computers before they are sure they can handle it...

ew-linux wrote: I'm sure there is

I was going to reference the - installed grub to the mbr from two different disks - post
until I noticed a few minutes ago you posted in the thread already too.

llivv wrote:

ew-linux wrote: I'm sure there is

I was going to reference the - installed grub to the mbr from two different disks - post
until I noticed a few minutes ago you posted in the thread already too.

Yes, but a messed up grub can be fixed. The installs that are already there, are still there.

Anyway, I always use one distro as a "master-grub". That is the one that is installed to the MBR. The other are installed to partition, or not at all. The OS-prober in my master-grub detects the other distros, so it doesn't matter what you do with the other grubs, as long as YOU DON'T INSTALL them in the MBR