Re: testing + some unstable packages

[Richard Cobbe <cobbe@airmail.net>]

Lo, on Sunday, March 31, Alan Su did write:

> i've got an installation of testing on my laptop, but i wanted to
> upgrade a few packages (notably galeon) to the unstable version.  i'd
> rather not just point apt to the unstable distribution, as i'm pretty
> happy with the way testing is working out for me.
> 
> in order to do this, i'm manually using dpkg to install packages that
> i download from the unstable distribution.  however, for this to work,
> i need to upgrade a bunch of other packages on which these few
> packages depend.  is there a way to determine the set of packages
> which must be installed (from the unstable distribution) before i go
> about installing the packages i want?  thanks for any ideas you might
> have!

Just spent some time experimenting with this myself; here's what I did.

1) Add lines for unstable to sources.list.
2) Add the following two stanzas to /etc/apt/preferences:

    Package: *
    Pin: release a=testing
    Pin-Priority: 900

    Package: *
    Pin: release a=unstable
    Pin-Priority: 200

3) apt-get update
4) apt-get -t unstable install galeon
        (As documented in apt-get's manpage, the -t flag temporarily
        raises the relevant packages from unstable to priority 990; as
        long as this is higher than the priority assigned to testing,
        you'll get what you want.)

Now, galeon and all of the packages on which it depends should track
unstable, while the rest of your system should track testing.

I've installed galeon and gnucash this way; everything seems to be
working just fine.

Richard


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