On Wed, 9 Jul 2008, Charles Plessy wrote:
this is a very good point. Actually, the situation is similar in my workplace: we have servers (that unfortunately run CentOS) on which the minimum is installed, and everybody compiles what he needs. A tremedous improvement to this situation would be to improve apt so that it can call dpkg with its --root option. Then users would be able to install packaged software in their directory with correct handling of the dependancies.
I do not know about --root option but when snapshot.debian.net was functional I used this and pinning via /etc/apt/preferences. If you implement some snapshot.debian.net like repository and educate users how to use pinning you can perfectly live with different versions. Kind regards Andreas. -- http://fam-tille.de