debian and net access

[Marcel Kunath]

Howdy,

well I am probably switching net access sometime in the future. I also am less
and less satisfied by the commercialization of Linux and still have the urge to
try out Debian and may soon have ample hardware to give it a try.

Now I understand you can install debian over ftp, which is usually my preferred
way of installations, via dselect and then update via ftp with apt-get.

What I'd like to know is how Debian organizes its package structure. I will
most likely be limited in the future on speed and amount of downloads and
wonder if packages are all kept in one place(single server) or strewn apart
across the world (I heard comments like "add this server to your apt-get list").

I probably would be interested in downloading Debian installation to disk and
burn it to CD and as well any updates which exist.

Basically with my future provider I fear I need to limit the amount of data
transfer I do and I want to prepare now if it helps avoid future pain.

I know one can always buy the CD set very cheaply but I am worried about
staying up to date. What is common practice and how do I minimize the amount of
data downloaded.

Another question I had was that Debian has three releases going at one time
stable, testing, unstable. If one uses stable today and it runs fine and then
suddenly Debian makes the switch that testing becomes stable and unstable
becomes testing how does this affect me as user. Do I have to watch that I now
get archaic packages for my "stable" release and not the newly stable packages?
Do they move the directories around? How does this work?

PS: I got some books for sale some of you may be interested in. They are in very
good to as-new shape.
http://montiehouse.com/~kunathma/books.html

Thanks,

   -- Marcel Kunath