[Tfug] backporting packages with Woody

[Harry McGregor]

On Tue, 2003-11-25 at 13:49, Scott Denlinger wrote:
> As Andre suggests, I am really interested in keeping the "base"
> distribution as "stable", but stable doesn't have Apache2, MySQL 4.0,
> Samba 3, etc., etc.

Most of the issues you will run into with unstable as a server have to
deal with package install and upgrade.  Security updates get into
unstable quite quickly.

We have well over a dozen server running unstable without issues.  You
have to be careful doing an apt-get upgrade, and check the change logs,
and possibly hold back packages that you don't want to touch (equal sign
in dselect).

>  So using backports would get me those without giving
> up the security updates for Woody. Yesterday I did a dselect "dry run" specifying
> "all" in my sources.list file, and I was surprised at the number of
> packages that would have been backported. I'm very tempted to go ahead
> and just let the backport debs update everything for which there's a
> backport. Maybe this would be the same as just upgrading to testing,
> since I'll essentially be giving up the security updates by backporting
> everything.

Unless it's only one or two backports that you need, I think will have a
more secure system running unstable than running backports.  The
backports are unsupported, while unstable is rather well supported.

I don't know the current state of testing, Nick might be able to toss in
some comments about the state of security updates in testing.

			Harry

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Harry McGregor, CEO, Co-Founder
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