This past Sunday marked the release of the new Debian stable version, 6.0, code-named "Squeeze." I've been running Squeeze testing version since May of this year, and when a Debian version moves from "stable" to "testing," a new version moves into testing. The new testing is called "Wheezy." My /etc/apt/sources.list points to "testing," rather than "squeeze," so that means that running aptitude dist-upgrade after a version-move can mean major changes, and, sometimes, major breakage of the Linux box.
I waffled around about what to do yesterday. I could point my sources.list to "squeeze," rather than "testing," so that nothing would change for a while, but the nice thing about testing is that it has newer versions of programs with the latest improvements. When I installed "testing" last year, I tried upgrading right to "unstable," (aka "Sid") which has the really latest and greatest stuff, but I wasn't able to get it working in the first couple of hours, so I just re-installed "testing." I've been reasonably happy with it (except for my intermittent "grub" troubles. (Check out the Debian sid FAQ, which is informative but mostly just funny.)
I decided to live my life on the edge, and stick with "testing," so after backing up my home directory six ways to Sunday, I just went ahead with aptitude update and aptitude dist-upgrade. It upgraded 220 packages. Expecting the worst, I rebooted, and NOTHING bad happened! Here's the really surprising thing--I did the same thing on my laptop, and nothing bad happened there either. Of course, "Wheezy" could turn on me at any moment....there's another update I'm running today. Still, so far, so good!
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