package madness upgrading stable pin
I have some questions about how to properly manage a mixed stable/unstable
system - with some extra personel desires.
I just recently got my Woody 3.0r1 CDs in the mail. Yay! I installed the
system, and then decided I wanted some newer versions of some of the
software (fluxbox, gaim...). I want to keep as much of my system at
"stable" as possible, because I'm on a very slow and expensive internet
connection.
I've pinned my priorities, stable: 500, unstable: 50, testing: 50, and added
an unstable deb and deb-src to my sources.list. Some packages
(kernel-source-xxx) I'll grab from unstable without problems. Others have
dependancy issues (usually a new, and very large, glibc) so I build them
from source with "apt-get build-dep" and "apt-get source -b". This is all
as per the Debian Reference, and works as advertised. I then install them
with "dpkg -i".
Now, the questions:
Is there a way to somehow indicate that the origin of these packages differs
from the other packages on my system? Using aptitude, my local kernel-image
package appears in its own section "Obsolete and locally created packages".
Other packages (gaim) appear exactly like the corresponding Debian release.
I _think_ the right way to manage this would be to set the package "Origin"
to "Local", but I haven't been able to do so. I tried to create a local
package archive, and had the "Release" file indicate my desired origin - but
this was not reflected within aptitude (I tried "aptitude search
'!~ODebian'"). This would also be a nice way to install the packages,
instead of dpkg. It would also be nice to have the origin of my
kernel-image set to "Local".
What if I want to make changes to some of the source? I'd like to be able
to fix bugs and recompile these packages, but don't want those packages to
have the same version numbers.
Am I going about this entirely the wrong way? It wouldn't be the first
time...
Thanks in advance to all you other happy Debain users!
Stuart Zilm
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