I stay with the toy story named releases. That way I never get a surprise upgrade when the meaning of "testing" changes. You almost never want that, since when the name changes it is the early days of testing.

Later when I need something from the next release, I'll upgrade to its name.

Ohh, the naming suddenly makes more sense... though I'm entirely unfamiliar with Toy Story,

Is there any way to tell (from the names) which are newer versions of Debian?

Personally, give me version numbers any day ;)

No easy way exists like in Ubuntus' steady progress of alliteration through the alphabet.

https://www.debian.org/releases/ lists the releases by codename and version number all the way back to 2.0/hamm.

At least you don't use Toy Story for your work computer naming scheme like my company.

Take a look at /etc/os-release, or /etc/debian_version for version numbers.

Otherwise you'll need to look at Wikipedia for the list. Recently the releases have been: etch, lenny, squeeze, wheezy, and now jessie.

Or simply consult the Debian website https://www.debian.org/releases/

Sid is a toy story character :P

That's fine, because sid is basically always the firehose of new packages. sid is always equivalent to unstable, so neither matters.

But "testing" is dynamic. Before the release it's lenny, after the release it'll surprise-upgrade itself to whatever sid was at the branching point.

also https://wiki.debian.org/DebianUnstable#Which_Toy_Story_chara...

Aren't they all Toy Story named releases?

I think he means that he has 'jessie' listed in sources.list, rather than 'testing'. The latter will refer to a different version when jessie becomes stable, and again when the next one becomes stable.

That's really up to you. If you need your laptop to function, it's probably a good idea to stay on the newly released Jessie for a few weeks or months. After a release developers usually push major upgrades into the reposistories. That tends to break stuff.