Debian - Sarge aka testing

sorry for the noobish question, but here goes:

I've been running Sarge on a few boxes lately. as of right now, all my sources.list lines look like:
deb http://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/linux/debian/ testing main non-free contrib

anyway, with Sarge set to (any day now. well, I hope...) become stable, what will happen if I update my system while all those lines still point to "testing"? will it hose something up? do I need to wait for Sarge to become "stable", and then manually change all the lines to reflect that? and did I hear this somehwere, or did I dream it, that I can somehow set it to "sarge" instead of either "testing" or "stable" right now, and then never worry about it again?

anyway, with Sarge set to (any day now. well, I hope...) become stable, what will happen if I update my system while all those lines still point to "testing"? will it hose something up?

If you leave it that way, ad infinitum, you will just continue to run a "testing" system, even after the release. Of course, after the release "Sarge" will be "stable", and "testing" will actually be "Etch". So, if you want to continue to use the "testing" tree, leave it alone. If you want to continue to use "Sarge", even after it becomes stable, you have a couple of options:

1) Change everything that points to "testing" to say "sarge". You can do this anytime you want. The downside to this is that you will have to change these when the next release (Etch) becomes stable, but that probably won't be for some time.

2) Wait until the release (supposedly next June 6) and change everything that points to "testing" to say "stable". That's probably the best option, if you want to run a "stable" system.

In either case though, you should almost certainly add an deb line and a deb-src line pointing to security.debian.org so that you can get security updates after the release.

- Colleen

option 1 really will work? cool. all the same, I think I'll just wait and take option 2. just seems cleaner, somehow.

and I've already got that security.debian.org line in there; I refuse to be the low-hanging fruit.



thanks, Colleen.

option 1 really will work? cool.
Yeah, here's why it works, if you're curious:

ftp> status
Connected to ftp.us.debian.org.
ftp> pwd
257 "/debian/dists"
ftp> ls
200 PORT command successful. Consider using PASV.
150 Here comes the directory listing.
lrwxrwxrwx 1 200 200 5 Apr 16 19:43 Debian3.0r5 -> woody
-rw-rw-r-- 1 200 200 400 Apr 15 22:34 README
lrwxrwxrwx 1 200 200 23 Apr 06 2004 experimental -> ../project/experimental
lrwxrwxrwx 1 200 200 22 Apr 06 2004 proposed-updates -> woody-proposed-updates
drwxrwsr-x 5 200 200 4096 May 31 19:26 sarge
drwxrwsr-x 5 200 200 78 May 31 19:26 sarge-proposed-updates
drwxrwsr-x 5 200 200 4096 May 31 19:27 sid
lrwxrwxrwx 1 200 200 5 Apr 07 2004 stable -> woody
lrwxrwxrwx 1 200 200 22 Apr 07 2004 stable-proposed-updates -> woody-proposed-updates
lrwxrwxrwx 1 200 200 5 Apr 07 2004 testing -> sarge
lrwxrwxrwx 1 200 200 22 Apr 07 2004 testing-proposed-updates -> sarge-proposed-updates
lrwxrwxrwx 1 200 200 3 Apr 07 2004 unstable -> sid
drwxrwsr-x 5 200 200 4096 Apr 15 23:12 woody
drwxrwsr-x 5 200 200 69632 May 31 19:26 woody-proposed-updates

As you can see from that dir listing, stable/testing/unstable are symlinks to woody/sarge/sid.

all the same, I think I'll just wait and take option 2. just seems cleaner, somehow.
You're right, it is (at least in theory). Since the upgrade process is so trivial, Debian really encourages thinking in terms of stable/testing/unstable rather than getting attached to which name may represent that tree at the current time.

and I've already got that security.debian.org line in there; I refuse to be the low-hanging fruit.
Just wanted to make sure. Most people running testing (which you are currently) or unstable don't have that line in there, because it does absolutely nothing for you unless you're running stable, or at the very least are running some packages from stable. Security updates for testing/unstable don't come from security.debian.org; they come in the form of new versions of the package built by the package's Debian maintainer, and filter down through the unstable->testing pipeline as usual.

thanks, Colleen.
Anytime!

- Colleen