Re: "best practices" on debian
On Tue, Dec 30, 2003 at 12:49:57PM -0500, Anthony DiSante wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I just installed Debian stable the other day, and with the help of
> some of the folks on the list here, got it upgraded (apt-get
> dist-upgrade) to the sarge "testing" packages. But some things,
> like mozilla, and the alsa audio drivers, and gaim, and xfree86,
> either didn't get installed, or didn't get upgraded to the current
> versions.
>
> I found apt-get.org, and see that there are lots of debian packages
> available from various sources there. But some things, for example
> mozilla, are available right from the mozilla site as binaries that
> have always "just worked" in my experience. Is it bad to install
> mozilla that way, completely bypassing the apt system?
>
> Likewise for gaim, and the alsa audio drivers, I've never had any
> trouble building them from source on my Slackware system, so I'd
> guess they'd build fine on my Debian system. And I want to go to
> XFree86 4.3, but dist-upgrade only gave me 4.2.
>
> I definitely want to have the latest versions for certain packages,
> like these ones I've mentioned. But if I install them manually, is
> that a problem? Isn't my whole apt system going to then be
> out-of-sync with what's actually installed on my box? Or is there
> a way to make apt give me the very latest versions (is that what
> "unstable" is)?
Yes. I think unstable is what you want.
see releases guide
http://www.debian.org/releases/index.en.html
to know what things you can get is
http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages
apt has -t option, with which you can specify the target-release
you like to get.
details on this, see apt-get(8)
but there is some things that you can't get with apt-system.
I don't know how do-it-yourself package affect debian-system.
I like to know that, too.
thanks.
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