What's the best package manager for single-package upgrades?

[Joe Rhett <jrhett@isite.net>]

Okay, this is probably a bonehead user question but I'm just getting used
to Debian.  Not normally a bonehead :-(

I would like/prefer to run 'stable'.  Debian/Woody installed on my laptop
perfectly fine.  Wireless/WEP, IPsec, X all up and running SWEET.

Unfortunately, the stable browser is 'zilla 1.0 :-(

I would like to run a modern Mozilla, without updating the whole universe
if possible.  I've done the documented steps for accessing unstable
(testing doesn't have anything newer) and rerun apt-get update and it sees
the packages just fine.  But when I try to upgrade mozilla it wants to
install 293 packages ... uh, no.

The man page indicates that apt-get upgrade doesn't handle single package
upgrades -- to use dselect.  Well dselect gets way way lost inside a tree I
can't find my way out of.  I spent an hour trying to make dselect happy,
and I'm still lost.

So finally I just went to the package directly using mozilla.  It tells me
of the dependancies, but allows me to download directly.  But then kpackage
barfs because it wants all the dependancies.

Am I really supposed to spend all night long manually downloading all the
dependancies?  Ugh.

So I am writing here in hopes I'm overlooking something.  Please, tell me
how one can update just one package and its dependancies, without doing a
full-on conversion from Woody to unstable?  If a single package forces one
to upgrade completely to unstable branch, then the entire purpose of the
trees appears to be a moot point.

Now -- skip the download and compile yourself.  No fun.  And skip the
'download the 'zilla net installer and use that' -- because I already have.
But I want to know how to solve this problem and stay within the Debian
framework.

-- 
Joe Rhett                                                      Chief Geek
JRhett@Isite.Net                                      Isite Services, Inc.