19th November 2017, 20:30
Hi smoreau,
There is an excellent article about Debian releases and how to do the apt pinning to one of them, but install packages from other ones.
http://rabexc.org/posts/apt-config
When you do this and install the Netrunner backports, which depend on Testing, I would recommend NOT to run a complete upgrade of the system, because you are indeed on the testing release and things might break. So I tend to keep the packages from the Debian snapshot that was tested enough by the Netrunner guys and just install the necessary security packages and stuff I want to have upgraded, but never a complete upgrade to last testing status as I had bad experience with that in the past - I tend to adhere to snapshot-to-snapshot upgrades as Netrunner releases are released and in the meantime don't touch a working system
Of course except for application upgrades like Libre office, Firefox etc. From this perspective, Debian Testing is a more bleeding edge distro than Ubuntu LTS so you have to be more careful 
There is an excellent article about Debian releases and how to do the apt pinning to one of them, but install packages from other ones.
http://rabexc.org/posts/apt-config
When you do this and install the Netrunner backports, which depend on Testing, I would recommend NOT to run a complete upgrade of the system, because you are indeed on the testing release and things might break. So I tend to keep the packages from the Debian snapshot that was tested enough by the Netrunner guys and just install the necessary security packages and stuff I want to have upgraded, but never a complete upgrade to last testing status as I had bad experience with that in the past - I tend to adhere to snapshot-to-snapshot upgrades as Netrunner releases are released and in the meantime don't touch a working system
Of course except for application upgrades like Libre office, Firefox etc. From this perspective, Debian Testing is a more bleeding edge distro than Ubuntu LTS so you have to be more careful