Unstable packages on Stable distr.

[Terry Hancock <hancock@earthlink.net>]

Hi,
I have only one computer (working anyway), which I
use for fairly important information.  So, I use
the stable Debian distribution on it.

However, I also do development on this machine, so
I often need later versions of libraries and so
on that I'm using in my projects. If I could just
install the unstable versions of those packages
it would save me a lot of trouble, because otherwise
I wind up having to install from source.

The reason is that the unstable packages seem to
have the assumption built into them that they
will never be used on a stable distr system --
that is they have dependencies on later versions
of basic packages.

In many cases these seem to be frivolous assumptions.
It seems very implausible to me (for example)
that compiling libsdl1.1 _really_ requires
libc6 >= 2.1.97.  I'm pretty sure that, installing
from source, libc6 version 2.1.3 (in Debian 2.2)
will work.  So why this dependency?  This appears
to exist only to force using the unstable
distribution throughout -- not because the software
would actually require it. (?)

And this happens all the time.  But if libc6 2.1.97
is defined as an _unstable_ package, is it going
to break my stable distribution?  Is it buggy? It
should just differ by a patchlevel, right?

So, how have people done this before?  Is it possible
to run a mixed box like this, or am I just out of
luck?  I suppose I could just acknowledge that
I'm going to have to install development
packages from source -- but if so, why have
the development packages at all?

Thanks for any suggestions.  Please reply direct or
CC me.

-- 
Terry Hancock
hancock@earthlink.net