17 Feb
2013
17 Feb
'13
7:36 a.m.
On 17/02/13 05:24, david wrote:
The way to handle updates on Sid: start with Aptosid. Update only those apps
that you find you need to update. I use Rosegarden, and it had some bug fixes
that addressed issues I had with it, and Debian Stable was never going to get
the fixes. (Neither did backports, as far as I know, but when I was using
Stable, I found backports pretty useless.)
I've used aptosid's ancestors that way since that same team made kannotix back
when etch was sid ... but it seems that they may have gotten tired of it or
something ... only one new release last year and very little other visible
activity ... one of the core team (there are about a dozen that have been doing
it together since 2006) has set up different version, but unfortunately it does
not seem nearly so rigorous, even if it seems a lot more open, friendly and
perhaps more active. So not sure about the future of that option. It has been a
great not-really-a-distribution for a long time.
FWIW, I'm running Sid on my two main systems (desktop and laptop). I also have
deb-multimedia in the repository collection, along with a couple of PPAs such as
one for the real cdrecord.
The deb-multimedia stuff is much less needed than it was a few years ago, and it
can certainly bite you with incompatibilities ... esp on sid, their libraries
are not always binary compatible but they will be the ones installed on your
system (if you don't pin stuff or actively manage what gets brought in from the
repository). They version them as more recent than the debian ones for this
reason, but unfortunately the other debian audio apps that they don't package
sometimes get broken by this, since they are built against the debian libraries.
Of course without something from outside you will be missing some things that
debian still finds un-redistributable (even after relaxing their approach on
software patents and allowing a lot more codecs in). Probably best to just fetch
a couple of apps from the repository and install them directly rather than
enable the whole repository.
Simon