Getting started w/ Debian

[mailinglist at endosquid.com (Brendan)]

On Tuesday 20 July 2004 13:14, Brian Nelson wrote:
> Of course it's not pure.  It contains plenty of stuff that's
> custom-written or modified from the Debian version.
> Besides, won't he be more confused when he thinks he's getting Woody but
> is actually installing an unstable snapshot?  Especially when he tries
> to "upgrade" to Woody and realizes he can't?

I may be wrong here, and it's happened before, but didn't say I something 
about replacing the sources.list file with the one listing pure unstable, 
stable, testing repositories and then doing an upgrade? If my memory serves 
me, that will bring you in line with the respository and if you do a 
dist-upgrade, it will remove packages in the way...So, you will end up with 
whatever you seek to be running, be it unstable or stable.

And, from my months of reading the knoppix lists, and looking at my original 
sources.list that knoppix generated, it's a mix of unstable and experimental, 
but you know, it seems to work pretty darn well, and even better just as a 
basis for installation. I know some of you are speaking without intimate 
knowledge of installing Knoppix, but honestly, this is the basis for every 
debian server I have running, which are numbering in the dozens and some run 
stable and others unstable.... 


> So does debian-installer (just don't go near boot-floppies)...

Honestly, I'm not looking to compare size here. He just had Knoppix to start, 
so I stuck with that. I really think we're going in circles here.

> Simply setting the sources.list and updating does *NOT* automatically
> pin you to a certain Debian release.  APT will not automatically remove
> packages that you previously installed but are no longer available in
> whatever distribution you've switch to, nor will it downgrade packages
> to the current version.
>
> If you try to use APT pinning and force the downgrades, you'll be even
> more screwed...

I just haven't run into this. Granted, I've only been running Debian in a 
production environment for a year now on dozens on machines. I'm sure 99% of 
the Debian userbase makes me look like a newbie, but doing a dist-upgrade 
should change you to running that "dist"...

B