On Sat, 29 Oct 2005 12:48:45 +0200 Joachim Schrod
I know the technology. That's why I asked for the _strategy_.
In this world of ever increasing entropy and chaos (and unexpected software bugs), is it reasonable to talk about "strategy" ? My own preference is to apply updates as soon as they are available -- my personal livelihood is NOT going to be impacted if I have to spend time to "fix" a computer problem created by "early adoption".
What do other people use? YOU? apt? How about smart?
* YOU -- I've been using this through YaST, in the belief that it is the "official" SuSE fix distribution mechanism. Once upon a time, YOU offered to fetch the SAME packages as I had already gotten with apt. That seems fixed now. But currently, it is offering (10.0) to fetch some packages that __it itself__ is identifying as 'older' than the installed versions. Go figure. Disadvantage: As delivered by SuSE, YOU only "sees" the packages that SuSE itself has set up. [I like it that my YaST gives me the choice of "ignore dependency conflicts" for, say, the delete of a package. I can do what I wanted, and fix up dependencies later.] * apt -- this has been my mainstay for fetching additional packages, and upgrades to non-SuSE packages. I do NOT have any "bleeding edge" components in my sources.list. I periodically view (with a browser) the sites which I access with apt. That lets me know, for example, that recently 10.0 added apt access to the kde and gnome components, while 9.0 removed apt access to a separate kde component. Disadvantage: If *any* kind of dependency conflict exists on my system, my apt won't go on. Then I have to laboriously solve the problem before I can proceed with what I wanted. [I have not used Synaptic on SuSE. On Ubuntu, its Synaptic lets me bypass an existing conflict for the time being.] * smart -- having read in this list that 'smart' is the future, I'm now trying it out. So far, so good. One thing I like about smart is that the GUI can show __all__ the versions available at all the specified depositories - so I can make an informed selection. Of course, asking for that much information can quickly lead to mental overload. Disadvantage: One more thing to be learned, when what I had been doing previously seemed adequate to my needs. Haven't used 'smart' enough to discover the pitfalls. mikus