Need to go stable

[Jesse_k]

Hi, I work as software project leader/software architect for a small Microsoft-products based company, I have had some success to introduce Open Source to the company.
We use Bugzilla, mediawiki and subversion. Previous we did run these programs on a Windows 2003 server but since autumn 2009 we are using Debian64 as server.
Because the packages for Bugzilla and Subversion was older than the ones we used on our Windows 2003 server and no backports existed we were forced to use Debian unstable/SID - please don't come with jokes about how foolish that was, I know its not recommended, but we didn't have a choice . We have had NO problem with unstable, and we do daily backups on the data. But of course I want to use the stable version.

I haven't done apt/synaptic updates in month, so I would think the "testing" distribution has been updated with most of the packages.
Is it possible to try to change the repositories to "testing/squeeze" when the big "Freeze" begins in March? And if its possible, can I transform my testing to squeeze when squeeze is released?

[Soul Singin']

Is it possible to try to change the repositories to "testing/squeeze" when the big "Freeze" begins in March? And if its possible, can I transform my testing to squeeze when squeeze is released?

That's possible, but there will still be a long wait between the freeze and the final release. If you go that route, then you should point your /etc/apt/sources.list file to "squeeze" now, so that you don't accidentally roll into the next "testing" after Squeeze goes stable.

If (like me) you want stable, but just a few backports, then you can run Lenny and backport the individual packages that you need. See my HowTo on the subject for details.

If you were starting from scratch, then I would highly recommend the latter. At this point however, the latter option would probably require a reinstall, so unless something is horribly broken, then you might want to stick with the former.

Nonetheless, if you choose the latter, then you could use the example below as a basis for setting up your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

Code: Select all

## LENNY binary packages

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ lenny main

deb http://www.backports.org/debian lenny-backports main

deb http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates main
deb http://volatile.debian.org/debian-volatile lenny/volatile main

## SQUEEZE source (to build your own backports)

deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main

Good Luck!
.

[Jesse_k]

Thank you, I will follow your advice.
We will go for the Squeeze alternative. Lenny is not an option, I tried it first, but I had problem with backports for both Bugzilla and Subversion, and the SID we have now is stable (as long we don't do apt) so it wouldn't pay to reinstall the server. We will use Squeeze and backports when Squeeze is released.

Debian has been a much better platform for Mediawiki,Subversion, Bugzilla, the installation was much more straightforward and faster than under Windows, and its support of 64 bit was much better, even when we are very novices regarding Linux.

We develop our products mainly in C#, so we were also able to write backup Jobs i Mono/Monodevelop for our Linux server inhouse. For me and my team Mono/Monodevelop is critical for wider Linux integration, we don't have the resources to use other languages. I know there are much controversy regarding Mono, but without .net platform available we wouldn't/couldn't have migrated the server from Windows to Linux.