Here's a nice article on using the non-stable Debian distributions, though I must admit I'm now in something of a pickle with dselect after adding the unstable distro to the list, and I don't know why. It seems to believe there are conflicts and doesn't have a good suggestion for how to resolve it.
August 8, 2003
comments...
I've always seemed to run into problems when adding Debian unstable to my list of stable apps, too. Part of that is because I'm running on the PowerPC platform, where "unstable" is even more unstable that on Intel. Also, not all of the dependencies are always compiled under PowerPC under unstable, giving me numerous dependency headaches.
If you really find stable to be too old for you, you might try "testing" instead, which is a bit more recent yet still pretty stable.
After trying twice to go to the "unstable" branch, I've reverted back to good ol' stable. Although I have to say, I would REALLY like to run Gnome 2...1.4 just doesn't cut the icing for me.
That old article I linked mentioned something about a setting that tells apt to use stable by default, and unstable only when I ask for it. Such a setting didn't seem to work (there was no apt.conf, only a directory called apt.conf.d with one of them weirdo numbered files in it, and I couldn't tell if it took the setting or not). So when I ran dselect with unstable in the list, it immediately wanted to upgrade *everything*, even without selecting any new packages.
I recently did a full backup, so I went for it. Conflicts were narrower without Apache 2 at first: I accepted the defaults until I produced an unrecoverable cycle, which had about 10 packages in it, then I could tell what the real problem was. I ended up removing all the packages in the list, which is lame and scared me at first. In fact, I don't know yet what functionality I'm missing; I intend to do a service-by-service test of everything before proceding.
But after 650MB of download from http.us.debian.org and an hour or so of answering configuration dialog boxes, the install succeeded, and I'm supposedly running newer versions of lots of things, including glibc and whatnot. The most annoying thing was a reorganization of the BIND config, which required manual intervention to make sure my zones weren't clobbered. Debian-unstable treats Apache 2 as a separate product from Apache 1.3, so I now have both on the system, 1.3 still running on port 80. So I'll have to fix that.
My only concern with running "unstable" is that now I don't have security updates, I can only upgrade all my packages to the latest dev versions and hope it fixes more bugs than it introduces. I chose unstable because I wanted newer things and didn't want to hassle with installing from tar balls for software I already have installed via apt and having to figure out what the differences are in the config arrangement. I'm such a lazy sysadmin!
I've run unstable for the last five years. I run it on all my production machines, as well as my workstations. You get the security fixes when the packages get updated (security updates in stable are essentially backports, after all).
The only time I run stable is when it really doesn't matter... eg, if I'm just setting up a mailserver or fileserver. Something that doesn't require new packages, and never will. Something that I can safely just say "Yes, apt, update everything and don't bother telling me about it unless it breaks."
The only issue I've had recently with unstable upgrades was with libpam, and that was fixed about two months ago.
Just did a Deb install the other day, and had no issues.
Apache1 and Apache2 *are* seperate products. Apache2 is not a drop-in replacement for Apache1.x.; there is quite a bit of functionality that is missing (from an end-users perspective) and would break functionality. Maybe when it Gets That Far, Debian will start treating it as a drop-in replacment and kill the branch.
As for your BIND configs... no idea. I use djbdns. ;-)
But based on my experiences with Postgres upgrades (big next-version update a few months ago), debconf can generally be trusted to handle things.. and it doesn't delete any files, just moves them to .dpkg-old or something of that nature, in their originating directory.
People who insist on using dselect deserve what they get. ;-)
Use apt! Or aptitude if you must have a GUI for the package system.
I could never get a hang of dselect.. it's just pants. Total pants.
Try `apt-get -f install'. If that doesn't fix your conflicts, you're probably going to have to go into `dpkg -i --force-all' land and resolve each packages conflicts manually. A pain, but something that happens so rarely these days I have to think about it for a few minutes before fixing it.