Re: Forcing gcc to 2.95

[paul@mackinney.net]

Jeffrey L. Taylor declaimed:
> I have a laptop with a small hard drive (540MB) running mostly testing
> (Postfix and emacs21-nox from unstable).  The only thing I compile on
> it is the kernel.  I would like to have just gcc-2.95 installed.  No
> gcc-3.2.  No gcc-3.3.  The disk is a 94% capacity.  Not good.  I
> cannot figure out how to tell apt-get to install kernel-packe and
> gcc-2.95 only.  Can someone give me some suggestions?  I have the
> following in /etc/apt/preferences:
> 
> Package: emacs21-nox
> Pin: release a=unstable
> Pin-Priority: 1001
> 
> Package: postfix
> Pin: release a=unstable
> Pin-Priority: 1101
> 
> Package: gcc*
> Pin: version 1:2.95*
> Pin-Priority 1012
> 
> Package: *
> Pin: release a=testing
> Pin-Priority: 1011

I'm not an expert with pinning rules, but there are two obvious
problems:

1. There are a lot of related packages that don't start with 'gcc'. For
example, g++. So you might need more rules.

2. 'gcc-2.95' depends on 'gcc' which is a meta-package that will install
version 3.3, etc. etc. (This according to what I can see in dselect.) I
can't image how you're going to get around this with apt.

suggestion 1: Use dselect, you should be able to deinstall all kinds of
things to save space. My experience is that it's better for tweaking &
fine-tuning your packages than apt.

suggestion 2: If space is that limited and you really never compile
anything but the kernel, desinstall gcc and build the kernels for this
machine somewhere else. (Not that you won't have thought of this
already.)

HTH, Paul
-- 
Paul Mackinney
paul@mackinney.net