Reiser and Potato

[dougie@highmoor.co.uk (Dougie Nisbet)]

I've searched the mailing list and see that this has come up before, but I 
haven't quite found the answer I'm looking for. I'm new to debian, so 
still getting to grips with apt and dselect.

What I'd like to do is build a stable machine so potato is fine. However, 
the only non-stable thing I need is reiser support. I have a few large 
reiser partitions installed using Mandrake, and want to access them from 
my potato install. I notice that I can rebuild the kernel to get the SMP 
support, but the only way to get reiser seems to be to download a tarball 
from www.kernel.org or wherever. 

At the moment I've built a potato system, and it's got SMP and reiser 
support and running kernel 2.4.14 (the latest 'stable' kernel, allegedly, 
but I've had a few machine lockups which sound suspiciously similar to 
what others have described for 2.4.14 kernels.) So to get a stable machine 
that supports reiser do I;

1. Modify my /etc/apt/sources.list to allow me to get 'testing' packages
2. Download a kernel package directly and compile it in.

I thought 2. would be the better approach, as it would allow me to keep my 
potato distro as potato as possible. I thought if I modified 
/etc/apt/sources.list to allow testing packages then I immediately stop 
having a potato system. 

I can't be the first person to find themselves in this quandry. Any 
suggested approaches?

Dougie