Re: Question about potato/woody
On Fri, Nov 03, 2000 at 03:34:32PM +0200, Shaul Karl wrote:
> > I'm a potato user and I would like to know some things about it.
> > I use my computer at home just to work, but I would like to know if I should
> > upgrade to woody, because I would like to have the last packages of some
> > programs, and potato does not have the last version(stable or not), and It
> > really annoys me.
> >
> > So, any suggestions?
> >
>
>
> If you get annoyed by not having the latest version then you probably need to
> upgrade.
> But bear in mind that it is titled as unstable. Although past expreince shows
> that it is rather stable, it could get broken. For example, a couple of weeks
> ago a libc upgrade broke exim and for a couple of days I could not get or send
> e-mail.
>
> My suggestion is not to use it on a production machine unless one has to, and
> at least waiting to hear that everything is stable enough.
If one really wants newer packages (or packages only available in
woody), often (not always) it is possible to build a potato package
from the woody source:
1. Add the following to /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian woody main contrib non-free
2. apt-get update
3. apt-get -b source <package_name>
Occasionally this breaks because of versioned dependencies, etc., but
I've had pretty good success adding new packages to a potato system.
If you want the latest libc, etc., you are certainly better off
upgrading to woody. At least the latest libc6 upgrade a few days ago
didn't break anything.
Bob
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