On Fri, Jan 31, 2003 at 09:34:35AM -0500, Noah L. Meyerhans wrote: > On Thu, Jan 30, 2003 at 09:20:10PM -0800, Anne Carasik wrote: > > apt-get -t unstable install snort > > apt-get -t unstable install ssh > > etc. > > > > So far, I haven't had any problems :) > > The potential for trouble is there, though. If at some point in the > future unstable's snort depends on perl 5.8, but perl 5.8 isn't yet in > testing, you'll end up pulling in the unstable perl to your testing > distribution and introducing far more changes than you bargained for. > > OK, that's not the best example, since neither ssh nor snort actually > depend on perl... But s/perl/glibc/ or libpcap or libsnmp4.2 or > whatever. There's plenty of potential to get yourself into trouble.
That actually does happen on my mixed woody/unstable system. I've got unstable libc6, with its bugs (man -k segfaults sometimes because of new regex implementation). A lot of packages from unstable have versioned deps on other packages from unstable, even libc6 a lot of the time. I can live with the instability because this is my home computer, but for a Real Computer situation with multiple users that I don't want to knock on my bedroom door for tech support, I'd build unstable packages from source, if their build-deps could be satisfied from stable. I suppose if the build-deps couldn't be satisified from stable, you could build them from source too. Sometimes that's more trouble than it's worth just to try out a package! -- #define X(x,y) x##y Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X([EMAIL PROTECTED] , ns.ca) "The gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish the hours! Confound him, too, who in this place set up a sundial, to cut and hack my day so wretchedly into small pieces!" -- Plautus, 200 BC
