Re: "best practices" on debian

• Previous message: Joseph A. Nagy, Jr.: "Re: gaim problem"
• In reply to: Anthony DiSante: ""best practices" on debian"
• Next in thread: Colin Watson: "Re: "best practices" on debian"
• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]

To: debian-user <debian-user@lists.debian.org>
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 15:15:49 -0600

On Tue, 2003-12-30 at 11:49, Anthony DiSante wrote:
--snip--
> I found apt-get.org, and see that there are lots of debian packages
> available from various sources 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?
>
> 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.

All of these have the most recent available versions already available
in unstable, so it's better to just use unstable then.

> And I want to go to XFree86 4.3, but dist-upgrade
> only gave me 4.2.
>
> I definitely want to have the latest versions for certain packages, like
> these ones I've mentioned. But if I install them manually, is that a
> problem? Isn't my whole apt system going to then be out-of-sync with what's
> actually installed on my box? Or is there a way to make apt give me the
> very latest versions (is that what "unstable" is)?

Yes, this is what unstable is for. The easiest way to use it is to open
up /etc/apt/sources.list, and change any instances of 'woody' to 'sid'
and any instances of 'stable' to 'unstable'. (woody/stable and
sid/unstable are the same so you could use either of each pair)

If you want XFree 4.3 you'll also want to use experimental. Add the
following to your sources.list:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ ../project/experimental main

Then you'll want to look at either pinning, or using something like -t
with apt-get. (That's what I do.) So to install the xf86 4.3 server for
example, you'd do something like:

apt-get install -t experimental xserver-xfree86

Note that unless versions are specifically specified in the
dependencies, you'll most likely end up with a mixture of 4.2 and 4.3 X
packages. This isn't really a bad thing, but if you want to be thorough
you'll want to look at pinning.

-- 
Alex Malinovich
Support Free Software, delete your Windows partition TODAY!
Encrypted mail preferred. You can get my public key from any of the
pgp.net keyservers. Key ID: A6D24837

-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-request@lists.debian.org 
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org

• application/pgp-signature attachment: This is a digitally signed message part

• Previous message: Joseph A. Nagy, Jr.: "Re: gaim problem"
• In reply to: Anthony DiSante: ""best practices" on debian"
• Next in thread: Colin Watson: "Re: "best practices" on debian"
• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]