Chasing Unstable

After using RPM based distributions exclusively for some time, I've become fast friends with the debian package management system and its associated tools. Once I gained familiarity with the system I decided to go chasing after the debian unstable distribution so that I could keep up-to-date with the latest packages and bug fixes in a more aggressive development cycle. It's fun. It keeps me on my toes, because a debian unstable system left untouched for just a few days can get quite outdated. Since I have a slow 64k dsl connection at home the downloads can often take longer than 4 hours. That isn't fun. I read the apt-get man page and it dawned on me: a nightly cronjob could solve all of my problems. I created the following script in root's bin directory.

#!/bin/sh
apt-get -qq update && apt-get -q -d -y dist-upgrade
apt-get -qq autoclean

And I add the following entry to root's crontab.

30 23 * * * /root/bin/chasing-unstable>/var/log/chasing-unstable.log 2>&1

The script is simple and safe. It silently updates the list of packages and conditionally downloads the packages that would be necessary to perform an upgrade. After it finishes the download it removes outdated packages from the cache to keep it fresh and manageable. Now every morning I awake to a debian unstable system waiting and ready to be upgraded at my command.