apt-get defaults for keeping my system stable and secure?

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Thu, 16 Aug 2007, john  wrote:

> I am running a web-server with Debian etch on it. I run apt-get update
> about once a week to figure out what's new. I also subscribe to the
> debian security list and I only want to patch security problems. Is it
> sufficient/best practice to have ONLY the following lines in
> sources.list:
> 
> deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib
> deb-src http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib

That should pretty much do it as long as you're happy to wait until the
debian security team fixes it.  They're usually fairly prompt.

There are optional non-security bugfix updates in the regular updates
repository, but you don't need them I guess if you don't want them.

Gavin