sport woman wrote:
Hi Donald, Thanks for letting me know that I'm not the only one having this problem! Your solution of trying to compile the application from the source myself is oneI'll try.
You have more courage than I! I am not as comfortable with "back-porting" as others. I generally limit my compiling to kernels and the few small source tarballs I want/need. If I run into a roadblock during the compile, I usually don't have the mental "horsepower" to solve it.
I guess a third choice would be to upgrade to a SIDsystem completely, but you have to risk the chances of breakage due to the constant state of change. KDE 3.1 is starting to flow into SID(unstable)but isn't completely there yet.Hmmm, I guess I don't understand 'apt-get install' as well as I had thought! My impression had been that it would automatically pull all needed packages with the one you 'apt-get install' for. (So when I did 'apt-get install gnomemeeting', using unstable for the sources.list, I had expected KDE3.1 to be pulled in with the gnomemeeting 0.96., since the gnomemeeting bug-tracker for Debian had said if I went to all unstable then both would work together.) Are you saying that the 'apt-get install' would not pull in KDE3.1, but that an 'apt-get dist-upgrade' to unstablewould have?
No, not quite. This is tough for me to explain, but here goes.... If the ONLY "source" line in your /etc/apt/sources.list is for "unstable" then an "apt-get update" followed by "apt-get dist-upgrade" should do a complete upgrade to the current SID or "unstable". This may or may not go smoothly, and you will only get whatever packages that are in "unstable" that are the "upgrades" of your current set of packages. You will get all of the new KDE 3.1 packages that are available, but probably will not upgrade all of the packages you have on your system. Those not upgraded may or may not run, depending on the conflicts with the new compiler & libraries. This could be a dangerous thing to do, but you never know exactly how "dangerous" until you try it. It is sort of a catch-22. Most people who run SID know how to get out of these situations, but it can be a quite frustrating situation for a "newbie".
Now if you have set up "pinning" in APT, then you will have two (or more) sources...usually "testing" and "unstable". Pinning will allow you to pull from either one if you specify a package, but for general commands like "apt-get upgrade" or "apt-get dist-upgrade" then the action will be first for the primary dist you setup in pinning and second for any "outside" dist packages you might have pulled in from the secondary source. I.E. if you pulled in Mozilla from "unstable" then an "apt-get dist-upgrade" will automatically pull-in upgrades for Mozilla from "unstable", but NOT the entire dist. The rest of the "dist-upgrade" will be done on only the "testing" packages installed on your system... provided you have "testing" as your primary source and "unstable" as your secondary source. Does this make sense?
Or maybe you're saying that right now, 'apt-get install gnomemeeting' for 0.96 OR 'apt-get dist-upgrade' for unstable would NOT allow me to retain KDE3.1, but sometime in the future unstable will have a complete KDE3.1 and *then* another 'apt-get dist-upgrade' will give me KDE again...
Hmmmm... I doubt you have KDE 3.1 from "unstable" currently installed. You shouldn't be having GNOMEMEETING trying to remove KDE if it was. You probably have KDE 2.2.2 from "testing" installed, and that is why GNOMEMeeting wants to remove it. It is probably not a direct relationship, but is the end result due to some conflicts among some lower-level dependencies, like the compiler. What I am trying to say is that at some point in the future ALL (Most) of the packages in SID will become good enough to move into "testing", including the new compiler and KDE 3.1, and GNOME 2.2, and the version of GNOMEMeeting you want. This will have to happen sometime before the next major release of Debian...SARGE. When will it all happen? Dunno...but my "sense" is that reaching that state of affairs is several months off. In the meantime there will be quite a bit of turbulence.
Sorry for my slowness to understand on this point, I'm a newbie trying to learn as fast as I can! :-)
Almost everybody learns faster than I do <grin>. Some day quite soon you will be teaching me... no doubt about it. Keep asking questions, and give advice to others when you can. I have discovered that the real "gurus" are pretty quick to correct a mis-representation of the "facts". If you can gracefully, AND gratefully accept correction, it is an excellent way to learn! Don't be afraid of saying something that might be "wrong"! "They" won't let it stand for long if it is....;)
Cheers, -Don Spoon-