I've been contemplating ugrading to sid, but I don't want my system to be continuously broken. Is it worth upgrading to sid?

I'd say stick with testing. If you do upgrade to sid, be very careful every time you do an upgrade. Blindly using Apt-get to upgrade in sid can be very bad. Use aptitude to upgrade and pay close attention to what is getting upgraded and WHAT IS BEING REMOVED. Because the packages in sid are being constantly updated, dependencies can get really screwed up. I have had sid try to uninstall most of my system on numerous occasions when I tried to upgrade. Testing is just fine for me.

ok. thanks. Approx. how long does it take for a package to get from sid to testing? Mostly what I'm looking for is k3b, which isn't in testing currently.

That is a moving target, based not only on the condition of the package in question (read the bug reports please), but also on the FTP maintainer, and the build status of the applicable dependent libraries, to mention only a few. Since KDE is currently undergoing a C++ ABI transition, it will probably take a more lengthy period of time than might otherwise be the case.

In short, there is no set answer.

ok, thanks. I think I'll stick w/ etch for now, as it just updated a bunch, and one of the reasons I wanted to go to sid(openoffice.org2.0)just came in. Thanks again.

If you have the time to hand-hold your system, SID can be a great learning experience. However, you do need to expect there can (and will) be significant breakages, and be prepared to read a lot of bug reports. I certainly would not take that step over just a package or two.HERE'S a nice mailing list entry on how SID was affected by the KDE transistion.

I have been using SID for awhile now and haven't had any major issue with it. I don't have KDE installed so I don't have to worry about all the stuff happening with it right now. Obviously something's mess up in Sid but overall I am happy with it. Although I enjoy using bleeding edge software and fiddling with things to get them to work right. I am using Sid with Enlightenment D17 and am happy with it. Haven't had an unusable system or major crash since I installed it 3 or 4 months ago, and I apt-get upgrade pretty much daily.

Yeah, if you are running KDE-free then there are quite a number of issues that don't come your way right now.

I think Sid is fine if you just pay even nominal attention to what packages are going in and out of your system (i.e. if something wants to uninstall that appears to be something you need, just cancel whatever it is you're installing). Right now I have a mixed stable/unstable (sarge/sid) system, and it's perfectly stable. I haven't done an upgrade because I don't need one. I just upgrade or install the software I want. I do this more because I'm on dial-up than by choice.

KDE was broken much longer (and worse, I think) in testing. That's the main issue that made me switch to unstable. And pay more attention to what I'm actually doing when I do a major upgrade. I really think unstable is just as "stable" as testing for the most part.

I use a mixture of Sarge / Sid with all new packages installed from Sid and I don't have too many problems with the unstable stuff. I do not use KDE. The question of Stable vs. Testing vs. Unstable is discussed all the time; some say that no one really needs testing, that production or mission critical boxes should use stable with security updates and that home users / hobbyists should use unstable, which seems about right to me.
I started with Woody when it was stable but close to the release of Sarge and was really annoyed at how much current stuff wasn't there or outdated (I started playing with backports, but never really liked the idea - perhaps I wasn't proficient enough to know what I was doing). I then installed Sarge (which was still testing) and was much happier, but eventually ran into the same problems as Sarge became stable and then began to become outdated (and even Testing before a freeze isn't as up to date as Unstable, which is the whole point of the OP), so I switched my apt sources to Sid, and have been quite happy since.

I'm with RodWC on the idea of a mixed system.

I have an upto date (ish) version of K3b and openoffice 2.0 running on Debian stable. K3b 0.12.2 was sourced here:

# K3B
deb http://www.planet-moll.de/debian/ sarge main

and openoffice was installed using this guide on ubuntuforum:

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthre...openoffice+2.0

Option 3


Mix and Match

or

Pick and Mix

A few interesting links:

http://wiki.debian.org/StatusOfUnstable

http://wiki.debian.org/TopicDebianDevel