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Re: Installing advanced library versions safely?



On Mon, May 27, 2002 at 04:33:58PM -0400, Dan Muller wrote:
> told that I need expat or libxml >= 1.8.3. Neither potato nor woody are up
> to libxml 1.8.3. (I was considering upgrading to woody before I noticed
> this -- not a decision to be taken lightly, since I live behind a modem!)
> 
> (And finally...) My questions: What's the best way to go about getting and
> installing libxml 1.8.3 or greater, given that it's not available as a
> package -- or if it *is* available as a package, it'll be in a distribution
> that I don't want to point dselect at? (I already went through a few hours
> of insanity when I made the mistake of pointing dselect at 'testing'
> temporarily.)

Let me answer in a general way, since I have no knowledge of the
specifics of libxml, its dependencies, when it will make it into
unstable etc.

1. The apt in woody can be instructed to grab packages from different
releases (stable, testing, unstable). In some cases, a package will
have dependencies on many packages that also have to be grabbed from
testing or unstable, so installing that package will essentially
upgrade (almost) the whole system. There is nothing inherently
problematic with such mixed system, it will just be not so thoroughly
tested since it will be pretty unique. AFAIK you can install the apt
from woody without upgrading the whole system to woody, but do check
that. (As woody is close to a official release, you might want to
upgrade to woody anyway).

2. Another approach is to use unofficial sources for apt. E.g. I have
a list for daily builds of wine in /etc/apt/sources.list. I don't know
how many software projects make daily builds available in deb archive
like this.

3. Install binaries (or from source) into /usr/local. The debian
package management system will never install files in /usr/local so
this is the place for your own installs. Stow is probably a good
helper here.


-- 
Note that I use Debian version 3.0
Linux emac140 2.4.17 #1 sön feb 10 20:21:22 CET 2002 i686 unknown

Hans Ekbrand

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