Ross S. W. Walker wrote:
I have always wanted a distro in-between long term support and cutting edge
I think Debian's testing branch aims to be this sort of thing, I haven't had a need to run testing in years myself. Stable is good enough for me
http://www.debian.org/releases/testing/
[..]That means that things should not break as badly as in unstable or experimental distributions, because packages are allowed to enter this distribution only after a certain period of time has passed, and when they don't have any release-critical bugs filed against them.
Please note that security updates for testing distribution are not managed by the security team. Hence, testing does not get security updates in a timely manner.
-- If your not upgrading on a very frequent basis I don't think you'd have too many problems. Back when I did run testing for a brief time (about 2001-2002 time frame) I upgraded maybe once every month or two, and never had a problem.
If your system(s) operate in a fairly secure environment, security updates may not be as critical.
There is often a time of brief instability in the testing branch after a stable release comes out when they re-sync with some of the latest packages. During this time it's probably best to stick with the stable branch, and "switch" back to testing after a good 2-3 months for maximum stability. If your apt configuration is pointed at the distribution name(e.g. "lenny") instead of the state (e.g. "testing") you automatically get upgraded to the next stable release when it comes out(and stay on stable until you explicitly reconfigure apt to point to the next testing version).
nate (still working on upgrading RHEL 3 and older RHEL 4 to CentOS 4.6)