Re: backporting question

["Benedict Verheyen" <linux4bene@pandora.be>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Colin Watson" <cjwatson@debian.org>
To: <debian-user@lists.debian.org>
Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2003 3:26 PM
Subject: Re: backporting question


<snip>

> Erm, sometimes, but it depends how complicated the dependencies are.
My
> subversion backport requires six other packages as well (apache2,
db4.1,
> neon, swig1.3, tcl8.4, and tk8.4), some of which are needed at
run-time
> and some of which are just needed in order to sort out all the
> build-dependencies.
>
> Backporting is really a development/packaging job, I think, which is
why
> it's not particularly documented for users. It probably can't be - it
> can legitimately be a complicated task. This is why developers who
> produce backports often make them available for others to use.

Maybe but a lot of people seem to be wanting to use one app or
another on stable.

<snip>
> I'm not sure what the functional difference is between backporting and
> installing from CVS. Backporting gives you a set of .debs, but they're
> built on stable for stable.

Hhhm. I'm not sure i understand. For exampe: you get unstable source
on a stable environment but you need unstable libs also. Some of the
libs are also needed on runtime so you will end up with unstable
libraries on your system or am i wrong? Why wouldn't you use pinning
then and just install these packages from unstable or does that
pull so many other stuff in that the system becomes unstable instead
of stable?

> The reason why people backport is generally to avoid having to use
> *core* libraries from unstable (e.g. libc6), not applications. Simply
> installing extra applications shouldn't destabilize a Unix system.

So the fact that stable is called stable and not unstable is because
of some core libraries and not so much because of the apps?
Is using the latest version of say libc6 such a bigger risk than using
the version say from stable? Or am i mixing stability with risks
here?

Benedict