Re: [Hamlib-developer] FT747GX timeout problem - solved?

[Stelios B. <sb...@en...>]

> On Mon, 29 Mar 2010 22:17:18 +0100, Chris Bryant <ry...@cr...> said:

>> On Monday 29 Mar 2010, Stephane Fillod wrote:

[snip]

>> Indeed, but unstable versions needs courageous beta-testers for the good
>> of everybody. It's very true for Hamlib also.

> Think I'm running out of courage at the distribution level. I run kde4.3.4 and  
> bits of it crash regularly, plus some important applications (kmail) ported up 
> from 3.5.x have lost functionality..... Happy to help out in some small way  
> with hamlib - much closer to what I'm trying to achieve.

I have used Debian/unstable for more than 10 years and always been
pretty happy with it.  There's the occasional breakage but nothing that
I couldn't fix with minimal effort.  In my experience, it's mainly the
distribution as a whole (i.e. as a collection of packages and dependency
relations) that is unstable, and not the individual programs.  It helps
if you're willing to keep abreast with the development of various
packages; in fact, using unstable is not a bad way to encourage yourself
to do so :-)

As for dealing with broken packages, tools like apt-listchanges and
apt-listbugs can help you spot potential problems and keep a package on
hold while it is broken.  You can choose to dodge a bad package revision
or help fix the bug(s), depending on your time and interest.  You can
usually downgrade a package if you notice the problem soon enough, and
historical versions of packages are also kept at snapshot.debian.net.

If you find unstable too volatile, you might consider using testing
instead.  Problems like "kde4 is broken" should happen much more rarely
there, and testing is never far behind unstable unless the version in
unstable is broken.


-- 

73, Stelios, M0GLD.