[Comm-en] Sisyphus.....Alt.....few questions

[Michael Shigorin]

On Fri, Jul 11, 2003 at 06:34:40AM -0600, Chad wrote:
> I would like to try some of the Sisyphus packages. I do NOT
> want to mess up my current install of AltJr2.2.

Wise.

> Is it best to do a second intall of AltJr2.2

Yes; I also do that when testing some new release to upgrade to
(or another distro).

> do all the updates and they go to the repositories and select
> the sisyphus repositories?

Ugh.  Explain yourself :-)

updates/ are *stable* updates, Sisyphus/ is an unstable
(developers') branch.  Rare packages tested in Sisyphus would be
backported/repackaged as updates if they fix security or critical
bugs.

> Then update everything sisyphus or can I just do certain
> progams?

Basically, you can do with several programs, but till some base
component (like libqt3) changes enough to drag all its
dependencies after itslef.

The recommended way is dist-upgrade (total), still sometimes
binary "refresh" goes OK, and in most situations it's possible to
rebuild src.rpm from Sisyphus on a previous stable install with
development.

I've been practicing that at home but now am mostly using
Sisyphus at work and Master+updates at home and on servers,
though home system sometimes gets newer things like kernel/alsa
which I want to test on yet another hardware sample.

All in all, using Sisyphus is recommended with broadband at hand,
and the packages downloaded could be backed up from
/var/cache/apt/packages just in case you want to bring them
somewhere else or redo something from scratch.

-- 
 ---- WBR, Michael Shigorin <mike at altlinux.ru>
  ------ Linux.Kiev http://www.linux.kiev.ua/