On Sat, Jan 18, 2003 at 01:54:56PM -0500, Seth Williamson wrote: > I am a total noob and I hope this question is not something so obvious > that it's been hammered to death on this list. Heh. it does come up fairly often, but it's an important and difficult question, so it's worth discussing again. > However, for a few--a very few--apps, I would like to run versions that > are newer. I'm not talking a lot here. Probably Evolution, Galeon, > Abiword, and that's it. Otherwise I'd like to run everything stable. As Karsten mentioned, these apps have rather 'extensive and deep dependencies' (I like that description :), so just pulling them from sid is not very feasible. Especially since sid has a newer version of libc (the basic system library that every single other program depends on), which can cause problems with currently installed apps. > Can somebody tell me how to modify my sources.list file to get this > done, and what the command would be to update those particular apps? At > the moment I have the standard sources.list file that comes with a > Libranet 2.7 install. Thanks... There's the pinning method that everyone else has suggested, of course, but there is another way. apt-get, since the release of woody, has a 'source' function, which can download source packages from the Debian archive and build deb packages from them. The advantage of building your own versions, instead of using the precompiled versions, is that it'll mostly depend on what you have installed currently, instead of what's in sid. To do this, you just need to add some 'deb-src' lines to your sources.list, pointing at 'testing' or 'unstable' (hereafter referred to as <dist>), depending on which versions you want to install. Then run 'apt-get -t <dist> build-dep galeon;apt-get -t <dist> -b source galeon'. This will install the build dependencies (headers and libraries, mostly) that apt needs to build a package from the galeon source, then download and build it, leaving you with neatly built Debian packages. I've not really used this feature much, so I'm not sure how it handles fetching libraries that apt *can't* get from your current distro, but other people seem to use it successfully, so I'm assuming it mostly Just Works :). Packages built this way will not be automatically updated until apt sees a more recent binary version (which, if you leave your sources.list pointed at stable, will not be until sarge releases sometime in the, er, 'future'), so you'll have to rebuild if any security flaws or other bugs are found. Yet another possibility is to just use precompiled binary versions of the programs you want; unfortunately, this isn't really possibly with these Gnome applications that have such E&D dependencies. If you were using, say, Mozilla and OpenOffice.org, I'd recommend just downloading their pre-built tarballs and installing them into /usr/local/ manually. Anyhoo, do report back with whatever solution you end up employing, since this is an issue that people are dealing with now, and it will affect more and more people as Woody's release recedes into the past. -rob
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