ereuter@erikreuter.net wrote:
>I am new to Debian (coming from Mandrake) and I don't yet know how to
>do things the "Debian Way" so please excuse my ignorance and naive
>questions. I have tried to read the documentation but the packaging
>system is difficult for me to understand with all the different programs
>out there (apt, dselect, dpkg).
Quick summary: dpkg is the fundamental package management program.
dselect provides a full-screen text interface to packages, and has been
around for almost as long as dpkg itself. apt is a more recent
development, and automates the downloading and installing of packages
and their dependencies; apt uses dpkg as a back-end, and these days
dselect often uses apt as a back-end. There are various other front-end
interfaces to apt, such as aptitude.
>I want to upgrade a package, newsclipper, from 1.17 to 1.28. The
>version 1.28 was just uploaded to the ftp pools about a week ago. I
>cannot find the 1.28 package by searching the normal package locations
>(http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages), only the older version.
>
>However, I have found the .deb file in
>http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/n/newsclipper/
>
>My question is, what is the best way to install this package? Should
>I use apt-get (if so, how should I modify the sources list?), dpkg,
>dselect, etc.?
Download it by hand and run 'dpkg -i newsclipper.deb' (whatever the
filename is).
>Also, newsclipper_1.28 seems to depend on a file liblockfile-simple-perl
>that I cannot find anywhere. How should I handle this?
liblockfile-simple-perl is stuck in Incoming at the moment, as it takes
new packages a little longer to be processed than new versions of
existing packages like newsclipper. You can grab it out of Incoming if
you're feeling brave (http://incoming.debian.org/), but that's not
recommended as those packages haven't undergone the usual sanity checks.
Best is to wait for a few days to a week or so and see what happens.
newsclipper-1.28 is a package from unstable, by the way; such packages
aren't guaranteed to install cleanly on a stable ("potato", or Debian
2.2) system. In fact, due to C library dependencies, it's usually
impossible; Perl packages are mostly OK for the time being, although the
Perl 5.6 upgrade is starting to make this less true.
--
Colin Watson [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]