woody packages on potato systems (was: Upgrading to Xfree 4.01)

[Johannes Beigel <jojo@beigel.de>]

Hm. I have a woody system, so that's not really important for me, but..

Seth Arnold <sarnold@willamette.edu> writes:
> Emmanuel, 4.0.1 is *not* for potato. If you want to run 4.0.1 on potato,
> please search for Charl P. Botha's packages built for potato.

Shouldn't all Debian-Packages work always as long as their dependencies
are fulfilled? (At least any Debian System should be upgradeable with a
simple "apt-get dist-upgrade" from the previous version. Or am I wrong
in this point!?)

> If things break, recognize that is because 4.0.1 was *never meant* for
> potato. If it works, then it is magic. If it breaks, that is to be
> expected.

My opinion is: If it breaks, the dependencies where not correct.

If it's really as Seth says, it would mean that it's impossible (or pure
luck) to use a mixture of a stable/unstable Debian system. I used to do
this for a long time with slink/potato, however. Sometimes there were
problems because Debian unstable is unstable. But usually all those
difficulties were fixed after a few days by doing a fresh "apt-get
install".

[The price to install a woody-XF4.0.1 on a potato is machine is at least
a new libc6, of course. So if you don't want to upgrade libc6, you
should definitely use Charl P. Botha's potato packages.]

jojo

P.S.: Maybe this should be discussed on debian-devel!?

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