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by Wowfunhappy 2210 days ago
Debian strongly advises against mixing repositories: https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian#Don.27t_make_a_Frank...

Debian Testing is an option, but would you recommend that over a distribution focused on rolling releases, like Arch? From my vantage point (which isn't particularly good, as a non-Linux user myself), most of the Debian project's effort is concentrated on producing Debian Stable. Case in point, security updates for Debian Testing are sometimes significantly delayed.
1 comments
war1025 2210 days ago
> would you recommend that over a distribution focused on rolling releases, like Arch?

Everything about Debian except the `stable` repository is explicitly a rolling release.

> Debian strongly advises against mixing repositories

Certainly you wouldn't want to add in the other repositories if you're aiming for Debian Stable type guarantees.

This is the `sources.list` file that I've been using for nearly a decade:

   deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ testing main non-free contrib
   deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ unstable main non-free contrib
   deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ experimental main non-free contrib
And then I have a preferences file that prefers testing to unstable to experimental (actually three separate files in the preferences.d directory, but I'd think you could combine them.

   Package: *
   Pin: release a=testing
   Pin-Priority: 700
   
   Package: *
   Pin: release a=unstable
   Pin-Priority: 650

   Package: *
   Pin: release a=experimental
   Pin-Priority: 600
It may not be advised, but it works pretty well. Sometimes you have to get a bit creative when you go to run `apt-get dist-upgrade` and it wants to delete half your system, but usually you can just manually install individual upgrades (`apt-get install <x>`) until it unwedges itself.
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