Re: XFree86

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

On Tue, Sep 16, 2003 at 09:25:09AM -0700, TongKe Xue wrote:
>   I did a search for "XFree86" in the packages section, and one of
> the responses I got was:
> 
> experimental  xfree86-common 4.3.0-0pre1v1   (583.7k)
> 
>   I'm curious about
>   (1) What is experimental? Even more unstable than unstable?

Yes. It's for situations where a package maintainer wants to get some
users to test things without subjecting all of unstable to it. Where the
instability of unstable is more in the area of interoperability (buggy
dependencies and stuff), experimental could be arbitrarily broken.

>   (2) What's been holding xfree86-common 4.3.0 from unstable? (I
> thought the process was fairly simple to get into unstable)

The maintainer doesn't feel that it's ready yet. The ViewCVS interface
to the Subversion repository doesn't seem to be working at the moment,
but go to http://necrotic.deadbeast.net/xfree86/, look in whatever
branches-4.3.0-sid-debian-* directory exists, and see the debian/TODO
file.

>   (3) How can I get files from experimental? (I had thought there was
> only stable, testing, unstable)

Use "../project/experimental" in place of "stable" in sources.list,
IIRC, but this is about the only place where I'd recommend using apt
pinning to make sure that only applies to certain packages: you really
don't want to upgrade to all of experimental. 

Personally I'd just grab the .deb files I wanted from
project/experimental on a mirror and install them with 'dpkg -i'.

-- 
Colin Watson                                  [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]