Re: How to track *part* of unstable?

[D-Man <dsh8290@rit.edu>]

I don't think that can be done.  Woody (unstable) is based on glibc
2.2 while potato is based on glibc 2.1.  Thus any binaries for woody
that use the C library at all won't run (even if you get them to
install) on potato.  You could probably upgrade the libc independent
of the rest of the system though (since it is binary backwards
compatible).

The other thing you will want to be careful of is dependencies.
Gnucash depends on guile and maybe a couple of other libs.  Other
apps/libs may also depend on those libs.  If those needed libs aren't
backwards compatible you may inadvertantly break other parts of your
system.

I think it would be best for you to try and find a source package and
build it on your system.  If gnucash itself (not the prebuilt package)
doesn't require newer libs this is the best route.

-D

On Fri, Dec 22, 2000 at 01:35:28PM -0600, Richard Cobbe wrote:
> Greetings, all.
> 
> I'm still fairly new to debian, so I'm not all that familiar with dpkg,
> dselect, and apt.
> 
> Is there a way to track the unstable branch for only certain packages?  I'd
> like to install the unstable version of gnucash.  I downloaded the .deb and
> tried an apt-get install, but it failed due to a number of unsatisfied
> dependencies.  Most of these dependencies simply required later versions of
> packages that I've already installed---from potato.
> 
> Ideally, I'd like to be able to use dselect to grab this version of
> gnucash and satisfy its dependencies, but I want to leave the rest of my
> system at stable, where it is now.  Is there a good way to do this?
> 
> The only thing I can think of is keeping two sources.list files, one for
> stable and the other for unstable, and switching them out as necessary.  Is
> there a better way?
> 
> (Also, and forgive me for asking this, but please CC me directly on any
> responses.  I've subscribed to this list and received confirmation of my
> subscription, but I'm not receiving any of the list traffic, and I'm not
> sure why.)
> 
> Thanks much,
> 
> Richard
>