just brew it! wrote:OK, fair enough.
So... given the extra care and feeding required, why *do* you run it, if not "to play with the bleeding edge"? Not trying to be disparaging here, I'm genuinely curious what you perceive the advantages to be. If the answer is that you value your role as a beta tester, that's certainly valid, and something I respect; Debian needs people like that!! But it still falls under the "play with bleeding edge stuff" umbrella, IMO.
I could see selectively pulling in a package or two here and there, but I don't think I have the time or patience to deal with what amounts to a rolling beta. This is also why I don't use Fedora on any of my daily use systems any more; while they do have official release milestones (unlike Sid), some of the Fedora releases have been kinda rough.
I run Sid because it's the best balance of current, tested, and supported. It's close enough to the Ubuntu "standard" that a lot of things intended for Ubuntu work, the Debian DFSG means that they're being militant about Free as in Freedom so I don't have to, and breakage really is rare and manageable if you're paying attention. People seem to have this mental image of Sid as some wild and unregulated playground where things are just added and removed for fun. Things are added outside the release tree, they get put in testing to verify they play with the other packages, get moved to testing when they are thought to be possibly stable, and down into Stable once they're old and grey and tested beyond chance of failure.
There are really at least three usable places on that spectrum, in my mind. The production machines run Stable, most of the machines run stable if it's recent, testing otherwise, and the machines I can take time to fix in case of problems run unstable.
To directly answer you, I run Sid because Sid and Testing are the same right now, and I care about recent more than reliable, on my daily use machines. I have backups, I have smart partitioning, and a second OS I can boot in a pinch.
Please don't edit my signature for me. Thanks.