Re: Getting a Higher Version w/out upgrading

["Stig Are M. Botterli" <samb@mo.himolde.no>]

In article <200212311236.12968.hal@thresholddigital.com>, Hal Vaughan wrote:
> 
> When thinking about this, I wonder: Is there a way to easily specify and add 
> versions later than in stable for only specific packages?  In other words, is 
> there some way I can do an apt-get and specify Perl 5.8 (assuming it's 
> already packaged) without having to move to the testing or unstable branch?

Add the following line to /etc/apt/apt.conf:
APT::Default-Release "stable";

With this, apt-get will default to installing packages from stable. To
install a more up-to-date .deb if available, simply throw in '-t testing' or
'-t unstable' as an argument to apt-get. Works brilliantly.

You will of course have to track the branch you want to pull in packages
from.


For easy version comparison, I'd suggest installing 'apt-show-versions':

~ $ apt-show-versions -a -p perl
perl    5.8.0-14        install ok installed
perl    5.6.1-7 stable
No testing version
perl    5.8.0-14        unstable
perl/unstable uptodate 5.8.0-14

'No testing version' because I don't track testing.