tim hall wrote: > On Wednesday 24 December 2003 21:45, Mr. Spock wrote: > > >>Could you clarify for me: I've got Debian Woody 3.0 Stable (+security >>patches) installed, but I need Unstable for the newer apps and libraries. >>However, the old Stable version of gcc (2.95.4) is not happy with the new >>(3.2?) one, and my attempt to apt-get things brought up unmet dependencies. >>So is there a way around this, short of reinstalling the whole base system? > > > Round? no. It is recommended that you either install stable /or/ unstable. > Mixing the two is very likely to give you errors like the one above. You will > also have problems with KDE3, Jackd, fltk etc. I wouldn't bother, personally. > > >>I'm sure Debian is cleverer than that! > > > Yes it is. Read Debian Reference. It will explain far better than I ever > could. I use apt-pinning to manage my mixed system. I'm still relatively new > at this myself. I've not had to do any forced installs in order to get a > (mostly) working system, let alone compile anything from source. I am using unstable (pretty much all the time, except of short period when I tried testing) and can't see any reason why bothering with mixing various versions (stable, testing, unstable). for servers that have to be rock solid I'd go with stable (stable is more stable and the software generally used on servers is late in the development, doesn't change that often so you can live with older software) for personal workstation (desktop, audio system etc.) I'd go with unstable, the few problems that it has are usually very quickly solved, unlike testing which is slower to get the bugs but LOT slower to fix them and AFAIK does not get security updates. erik
