On Tue, Jan 04, 2000 at 02:23:16PM +0100, Jens Guenther wrote:
> > Some may be useless, e.g. sources that explicitly require glibc-2.1
> > or gcc-2.95.
> The problems I encountered where in no case compiler- or library-related.
> Compilation worked fine. The only problem was that the package building
This won't always be the case - I can see C++ packages needing a later
GCC version, for example.
> It should be possible to build packages for local installations from potato.
This would be nice if it were possible, but supporting up to date parts
of the distribution often means that a package won't work on the
currently released version. Things like debconf or logrotate just aren't
there in slink, and dependancy changes like the perl and netstd splits
need to be taken into consideration too.
> If it is not possible to do this, many of the advantages of providing source
> packages and not merely sources would go away. You would be stuck with
> stable. So often someone's problems were solved by "grab the potato
> version of it".
Well, the one of the advantages of providing source is the way it gives
you the freedom to go out and fix your own problems :-) . Forcing all
packages to build on older releases would create a fair amount of extra
work for the developers which won't always be useful for users (mostly,
stable works just fine).
The way you're supposed to do this is with partial upgrades, but
glibc2.1 makes this a bit more offputting than it normally is.
--
Mark Brown mailto:broonie@tardis.ed.ac.uk (Trying to avoid grumpiness)
http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~broonie/
EUFS http://www.eusa.ed.ac.uk/societies/filmsoc/
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