Building backports and local repositories

[David <dbree@duo-county.com>]

I'm wanting to install a few backports and want to verify that I'm not
about to hose any of my system.  I'm running Sarge...

The particular packages is the Postgresql set of packages.  I wanted to
go to 8.0.3 and installed the packages from Testing a few weeks ago.
Now, there are updates, but now they depend on the Testing libc6 (and
Perl5.8, which have now parted from Stable), and don't want to mess with
libc6, but would like to have the updates, so what I did was: download
the postgres 8.0.3 diff file and the original postgres 8.0.3 source and
began compiling.  One thing I had to do was that in order to get an
error-free compile, I had to install two libraries I compiled from this
source, since the current packages depend upon libc6, however, I don't
see any problem here:

>From libecpg5:

dlb@localhost:~$ ldd /usr/lib/libecpg.so.5.0

        libpgtypes.so.2 => /usr/lib/libpgtypes.so.2 (0x4001a000)
        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ - had to install libpgtypes2 and recompile

        libpq.so.4 => /usr/lib/libpq.so.4 (0x40029000)
        ^^^^^^^^^^ - already installed
 
        -----  remainder are from "standard" sources ----

        libssl.so.0.9.7 => /usr/lib/i586/libssl.so.0.9.7 (0x40046000)
        libcrypto.so.0.9.7 => /usr/lib/i586/libcrypto.so.0.9.7
(0x40073000)
        libkrb5.so.3 => /usr/lib/libkrb5.so.3 (0x40161000)
        libcrypt.so.1 => /lib/libcrypt.so.1 (0x401c9000)
        libm.so.6 => /lib/libm.so.6 (0x401f6000)
        libpthread.so.0 => /lib/libpthread.so.0 (0x40218000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x40269000)
        libresolv.so.2 => /lib/libresolv.so.2 (0x4039c000)
        libnsl.so.1 => /lib/libnsl.so.1 (0x403af000)
        libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x403c4000)
        libk5crypto.so.3 => /usr/lib/libk5crypto.so.3 (0x403c7000)
        libcom_err.so.2 => /lib/libcom_err.so.2 (0x403ea000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x80000000)

>From libpgtypes2:

dlb@localhost:~$ ldd /usr/lib/libpgtypes.so.2.0
        libm.so.6 => /lib/libm.so.6 (0x4001b000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x4003d000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x80000000)


Now the question:  Does the above not create a set of valid debs that I
can safely install?  More generally, is all that's required to
produce a stock backport just to download the source, and the diff file
and compile - doing whatever is required to eliminate all compile
errors?

One further question regarding apt.  I have created a local APT
repository which appears will be ready to install my new packages.
However, the documentation seemed to imply that a line in
/etc/apt/preferences such as:

    Pin: origin ""

would refer to local files.  However, my result seemed to be similar to
that of many others from searching the archives.  The only way I could
get my local repository to be preferred was to put a line "Origin:
Local" into my Release file and then have a line "Pin: release o=Local"
in my preferences file.  Not a problem, but it would have been neater
IMO, if I could have used the original plan.