Re: "best practices" on debian

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To: orders@nodivisions.com
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 16:41:07 -0200

Em Ter, 2003-12-30 às 15:49, Anthony DiSante escreveu:
> I just installed Debian stable the other day, and with the help of some of
> the folks on the list here, got it upgraded (apt-get dist-upgrade) to the
> sarge "testing" packages. But some things, like mozilla, and the alsa audio
> drivers, and gaim, and xfree86, either didn't get installed, or didn't get
> upgraded to the current versions.

        Things that haven't trickled down to testing from unstable haven't yet
been properly integrated and debugged. Better to wait; a package at
stable will take two weeks to get to testing unless an important bug
appears.

        Either that, or the package has broken dependencies, which also are
cured by bug reports and waiting for the trickling down of corrected
dependencies from unstable.

> I found apt-get.org, and see that there are lots of debian packages
> available from various sources there.

        Generally speaking you will only use stuff from apt-get.org if you
really can't wait for testing, or if you don't want mix unstable
packages (that's what I've been doing), or if it is proprietary or not
yet integrated. Better to avoid, in general. I get only the Java2
plugin, the Flash player plugin, the RealAudio player and mplayer
modules from there.

> But some things, for example mozilla,
> are available right from the mozilla site as binaries that have always "just
> worked" in my experience. Is it bad to install mozilla that way, completely
> bypassing the apt system?

        Yes, it is. Not a catastrophe, but your system won't be as consistent
as with Debian. In the long run, you're in for complexity and lack of
coherence, and therefore, for bugs and strange behaviour.

        Using non-debianised packages is akin to the situation in MS-land
before the MS Windows Installer. Not pretty, even if the fundamental
soundess of the GNU system and the Linux kernel does help.

> Likewise for gaim, and the alsa audio drivers, I've never had any trouble
> building them from source on my Slackware system, so I'd guess they'd build
> fine on my Debian system. And I want to go to XFree86 4.3, but dist-upgrade
> only gave me 4.2.

        XFree86 is always tricky, since before it gets even to unstable it has
to compile in all architectures -- and we've a dozen. You can think
that XFree86 is really x86-only until it has been debianised.

        I've got XFree86 4.3 from the private directory of a developer. Now it
soon be in experimental or stable.

> Or is there a way to make apt give me the
> very latest versions (is that what "unstable" is)?

        Almost.

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