Re: [OT] Debian Mixed System

[Muhammad Alkarouri <malkarouri at yahoo dot co dot uk>]

I am continuing this thread on general, as I agree that doc is not the
best place. Anyway, I was asking Christian. Because of that I responded
there (not that it was a conscious decision).

On Tue, 2004-06-29 at 15:04, Mohammed Elzubeir wrote:
[...]
> Now, I remember having this conversation with you before ;) I didn't
> have the best answer at the time. The answer to this is "pinning".
> Doesn't make sense? Take alook at the APT-HOWTO [1].

Sure. That is a valid reason for me to ask again:)
By the way, I use apt normally now, in fedora. So I am familiar with the
system. You have various good repositories there, though redhat wants
everybody to use yum..

> 
> In reality, there is no good answer to this. Your best bet is to keep
> your system mostly on 'stable' and grab packages from different branches
> of debian (unstable or testing.. or even experimental, depending on your
> needs). As an admin, you will have to watch out for advisories (as well
> as doing your own security analysis of course). So, as long as you go
> out of your way to grab things out of 'stable', you are going to have to
> watch out for those packages yourself (in terms of security). Otherwise,
> Debian can happily accommodate with a mixed system (as the howto likes
> to call it).
> 

This is exactly the problem. I need my system to be mostly on testing,
or using new versions. For example support of Arabic is much better in
the new versions. And there are no advisories for testing, as far as I
know, so I will have to do double the amount of work to check if every
warning concerning some software out there is relevant to me or not.
I also have the subjective feeling that Debian stable being old and
presumably stable has not resulted in a number of security warnings less
than that of fedora or suse, for example, so I don't feel that I gain
more security there.

If there is no good answer to this, I will continue to use fedora, or
mandrake as munzir would like, or suse who have released an iso at last,
or gentoo. Probably the latter.

The reason I am asking this now is because I now have additional reasons
to switch to debian: I am installing familiar linux on an ipaq, and it
upgrades to debian-arm, so I figured that it would be better for me to
use debian throughout, if possible. Not that I have to apologise for
using debian.. as Anmar is waiting:)

Salam,
Muhammad Alkarouri