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Comment by shared4you | Hacker News Reader

My sources.list has the word "testing" all this while. Should I change it to "wheezy" now? I'm asking because I guess new packages (in large numbers!) will start trickling down to testing/jessie and the possibility of breakage is high. What is a reasonable time to expect this "rush" to slowdown or come back to the pace of "normal" testing?

I can probably live with my existing "testing" for say 1-2 months, after which I would like newer packages.

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Using release code names ("wheezy") is generally safer, because that way you don't accidentally upgrade.

Note that if you have pinning rules, then there you must also change "testing" to "wheezy".

I'd say switch the sources.list to 'stable' or 'wheezy' for a few weeks. After that, switch back to 'testing' and run "apt-get dist-upgrade --assume-no" and see what Debian is going to upgrade.

There is no real proper way to do this, other than testing in a VM, or a chroot.

I recommend using --simulate instead of --assume-no though so you get to see the specific versions.

FWIW, I've been running Debian "testing" on my machine since 2001-ish and I've never done anything special near releases. Except maybe rejoice at all the old packages finally getting upgraded. :-)

Didn't you run into any breakage of packages? I mean there's this mad rush into testing right after a new release. I'm thinking of running wheezy for a couple of months until the storm calms down.

I've found the Debian package maintainers to be quite careful, even when there's a large amount of rapid change to testing. I think they put a lot of effort and thought into avoiding breakage, even in scenarios like this. Any time I've encountered broken packages, the problem has been resolved quite quickly, especially if more important and widely-used packages are involved.

I'm using a mix between unstable and Mint for a Steam box (games, music, movies, web) and found out the label must be mistaken. It's a minimal installation, but everything from ATI drivers to multi-arch support worked perfectly out of the box. It already went through several dist-upgrades without any manual intervention (except maybe a couple of "yes/no" questions).

When did you install? Testing/Unstable are relatively quiet during a freeze, so just wait till everybody realises that Wheezy is out and you should get plenty of breakage :)

Several months ago... what you say makes sense, should I expect generally less breakage than Ubuntu or more? I wouldn't like having to install Ubuntu, mostly because it's too difficult to manage and troubleshoot...

For those running testing (or sid/experimental) I highly recommend apt-listbugs -- it will list (critical) bugs related to packages you're about to upgrade/install -- and allow you to back out. Often you can just hold off a few days, and some hardworking Debian volunteer will have made the problem go away -- before you need to experience it.

A couple weeks is probably long enough. Time for the flood of new packages to come in and anything broken to get reported and fixed. It doesn't take that long as lots of people use testing.

i had to install a testing snapshot May 4 because wasn't sure when they were releasing stable wheezy, and needed it immediately.

only package that broke the next day after full dist-update was "less" which for some reason will not co-exist with man-db. that was it though everything else updated fine

FYI, the less/man-db issue is tracked here:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=695361

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