On Tue, 4 Sep 2001, hoffy wrote:
> Are these applications, which I am beginning to understand are all
> interelated and you have the finest amount of control with dselect,
> primarily used for upgrading entire systems or can they be used to
> update a single package especially if the single package is in another
> stage of development than what all your other packages are.
>
> For example, I have "potato" on my system in which all the package
> versions are listed as stable. I want to use dselect to install a
> package that is listed in the unstable stage. Can I do it without
> having to completely upgrade my system to "woody" or something or
> without having a slew of dependency problems??
>
> Trying another way of asking the same thing. Can you mix packages in
> testing or unstable with potato without having to upgrade to woody?
Firstly, if you are posting to linux.debian.user, probably nobody is
seeing your message. Send to the mailing list debian-user (see
lists.debian.org). Lists from debian-user are sent to linux.debian.user,
but it doesn't seem to work the other way.
In reply to your question, there are two ways to do what you want.
a) Change sources.list to point to woody (or whatever) and then do apt-get
install foo. It will then install foo along with any needed
dependencies. The problem with this is that it might upgrade large parts
of system to woody, which you may not want.
2) (My preferred method) Compile foo from source, recursively compiling
dependencies as necessary. This method does not always work cleanly;
however when it does it is less drastic than method 1). I am currently
using potato, and use method 2) whenever possible. I have never used
method 1).
These issues come up a lot. Look at list archives of debian-user on
lists.debian.org or linux.debian.user on groups.google.com (these are the
same, of course).
Sincerely, Faheem Mitha.
