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After Jessie is the official stable for Raspbian now, is it possible to run Raspbian testing on a RPi 2 without breaking the system?
I am fine with occasional hiccups, and fiddling with pre-inst or post-inst scripts if necessary, but if chances are high that I completely break the system, like esssential packages or dependencies missing, I'd rather not try.
I haven't noticed any problems.
I'm not sure how long I've been using stretch/sid (I just have testing in my /etc/apt/sources.list).
harry ~ $ cat /etc/os-release
PRETTY_NAME="Raspbian GNU/Linux stretch/sid"
NAME="Raspbian GNU/Linux"
ID=raspbian
ID_LIKE=debian
HOME_URL="http://www.raspbian.org/"
SUPPORT_URL="http://www.raspbian.org/RaspbianForums"
BUG_REPORT_URL="http://www.raspbian.org/RaspbianBugs"
harry ~ $ cat /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org/raspbian/ testing main contrib non-free rpi
dist-upgrade? I doubt the whole system would have been upgraded without you noticing (from wheezy -> jessie took quite a bit of time, yes/no stuff, etc). I think apt may have changed os-release for its own mysterious reasons (maybe check the date on libc). I.e., you have access to the stretch repos, which is not the same thing as overhauling the whole shebang. I could be wrong.
os-release turns out to be in the "base-files" package.
upgrade bumps your existing packages to their newest versions, while dist-upgrade also installs new packages and removes obsolete ones. The latter one is closer to a new install of the new distribution.
apt is on the dist-upgrade list, but it is not on the plain upgrade list.
None of the answers previously presented here address the part "without braking your system".
If you look at the packages installed in Raspbian, you will notice that some of them come from a collection that are essentially the Debian package collection ported to armv6. However, another part of the packages are the Foundation's own created packages that come from another collection.
If you go and mix distributions by adding packages from testing with these other packages, there is a possibility that you end up in a situation where dependencies cannot be met. So, some package will not be able to install any version, or you might not be able to remove a package or whatever. In addition to that Debian's testing packages do contain more bugs and change quite rapidly (so the possibility of breakage is always eminent, even if it works now).
Testing packages also do not get security patches and backports from the security team, although the actual package managers might incorporate such updates into their own code.
Because of all of this, it is clearly better to use the older packages in the official repo, unless you have some packages that absolutely need to be of a newer version. In that case, it would be much more safer to backport only those packages by building the source against the official distribution's packages (if someone else has not already done it) than dist-upgrade to stretch/testing.
I updated a RPi B and a RPi 2 to stretch, both run for a few hours and then died overnight.
My own conclusion: Reinstall with Jessie and manual install of the couple of packages where I need a newer version. Stretch is not a good idea for more than a 15-minute test run.
