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I'm new to LMDE and trying it for the "rolling release" feature as I find Ubuntu's 6 month cycle to short to get any real use of the systems and the LTS releases never update the libraries so you quickly end up with obsolete versions of things like gstreamer.

Very happy with my initial install and quickly got most of what I need via synaptic, but now the first set of updates is breaking things -- removing Eclipse if I upgrade. Since I need Eclipse I canceled the update.

Then I did in sequence:
apt-get updated
apt-get upgrade.

This installed a lot up upgrades and didn't remove anything.

Then I tried:
apt-get dist-upgrade

And this is where it wants to remove Eclipise and some other things, so I said no.

What is the best way to maintain a rolling release version of LMDE? Since its a claimed feature, the maintainers must have an idea of how it is supposed to work. Please explain.

Or do I just keep periodically doing:
apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

And ocassionally try:
apt-get dist-upgrade

and cancel if it offers to remove stuff I need?

wb666greene,
tks for opening a specific topic for your questions

- the first question (eclipse): was removed from testing (eventually to prepare the new update i would say - things like this sometimes happen), but it's not a dead-end (as always in linux you have several options) http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... t=+eclipse

- now the question about managing the rolling nature of LMDE:
1- in testing (where i have more experience) updating is more often than not a waiting game;
2- LMDE should be managed always with dist-upgrades; if a dist-upgrade looks catastrophic to the system, cancel it and wait for better day(s);
3- removals and additions are part of testing, testing is a moving (and fast-moving) target;
4- most of the above items won't apply to the update-packs (but we can't say for sure in what way)

Thanks for the answer. Waiting until what I need will not be broken will be fine.

I'm a bit confiused about the update-packs, what installs them and how do I find out they are available?

My excursion into LMDE is strictly on a "when I get a chance" basis I'll have a much better idea about it next week after I've had a chance to compile some of my code.

I noticed that checking the "Source" box in the repositories only add one deb-src line and apt-get source avidemux didn't work until I manually added deb-src lines to match the rest of the entries in /etc/apt/sources.list. I need the avidemux sources to compile a plugin I wrote.

I've not added any repos, so I'd expect checking the source would enable all the ones in the distributed sources.list instead of only one. Is this by design or an oversight?

I hope you don't mind a slightly off topic question but I have to ask ....

You referenced Eclipse a couple of times in this post. Are we talking about Eclipse the development environment or is there another eclipse I don't know about. If you are a software developer I would think you'd want an OS that's more stable or at least more predictable than one based on Debian Testing. For you the OS is a platform to get something else done not something that you need to maintain, right?

Yes I use the system mostly for software development. But I also "clone" it so my code runs as an appliance. Nice feature of Linux is I can distribute my development system so I have the tools with me at the remote locations where it gets used. Its even nicer that I rarely have to touch the remote boxes once they are set up initally.

I'm looking for the "rolling release" feature so I can develop with reasonably up to date libraries like gstreamer.

I'm not partularly up on the debian way, but debian stable is usually at least as out of date as a Ubuntu LTS release on average.

My excursion into LMDE is simply to see if the rolling release feature is viable or not before Ubuntu 12.04 comes out. Its the two year update cycle I'm trying to avoid with a "rolling" release LMDE claims as a feature.

I took a quick look at Sabayon but I'm not willing to go back to manually editing x.conf files, I thought I'd left that behind long ago.

unfortunately, rolling means occasional regressions and breakage, to use an expression i've used in this forum before... "it is the nature of the beast" (lol)....even if you use and wait for the update packs (in the default mode of "latest" which means the lmde community has already updated with them and checked them out first)...even those won't "protect" you 100% against those kind of things happening...

Well I've been doing:
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

and accepting upgrandes.

The I've done:
apt-get dist-upgrade

and canceling when it wants to remove Eclipse (or something else I need. So far I at least have a working system. We'll see if Eclipse ever gets upgraded instead of removed, but its only been a little over a week.