At 04:10 PM 6/23/01 +0200, you wrote:
On Sat, Jun 23, 2001 at 12:29:12AM -0700, Ross Boylan wrote: > I tried a brute force approach to getting the unstable package for > gtoaster; I downloaded the deb and did a dpkg -i. I figured if there > were missing prerequisites, it would not install. Let me guess, you have considerable experience running Red Hat Linux?
No.
Is doesn't have to be like this with Debian. Use dselect, it fits all your purposes. If dselect will not let you install some package, it is either not advisable from a perspective of system consistentcy, or you haven't set up the prerequisites incompletely.
Neither dselect nor apt would work without changes because unstable/sid is not in my sources list. The newer version was only in unstable. I didn't want all of unstable. There only safe options I know of: 1) Edit sources list to include unstable/sid. apt-get update; apt-get install xxx; edit sources.list back the way it was. apt-get update. I'm not sure if this updates only xxx and dependencies, or if it updates everything that now seems out of date--which would be everything.
2) like 1, with dselect.3) Use apt-get's new pin feature (-t) after editing sources list. The problem is that if I want this on an ongoing basis I need to add unstable to sources list, leaving woody there (1+2 just replace it). Then I need to set some option in apt.conf to pin woody, and then override it on the command line for sid. Finally, because I have a longer sources list, every apt-get update over a modem would take longer. If I restore my sources.list, this ends up being like 1+2, only more work.
4) apt-get source and build/install.So I thought I'd try just installing the deb. As I said, I thought the version dependency checking happened at the dpkg level.
Live and learn. Thanks for the info.