On Tue, Aug 01, 2006 at 05:10:34PM -0700, K. Richard Pixley wrote: > Hello. I'm a long time unix/linux geek, debian newbie. And I'm > confused about installs. > > I understand that the "stable" distribution line is intended to be a > series of integrated packages. welcome! > > I understand that "testing" is a set of newer packages, which have met a > set of stability criterion which make them plausible candidates for an > upcoming "stable" release, presuming they survive a burn in period. yes, essentially. Better terminology, at the risk of starting a war, would be to say that "etch", the future stable release is a set of packages going throuhg that burn-in period. those packages will continue tobe called "etch" as they move into stable. but this is another discussion, see the archives for many different ways of understanding this. > > So I have a stable installation. And I'm interested in trying/using a > particular package from "testing". this is what's called a mixed system. It IS doable, but can be tricky depending on the dependencies of the package you want to try. UNfortunately, there is currently a major libc6 change from sarge to etch that makes it, I imagine, pretty much impossible to run a mixed system. this is, of course, because basically everything depends on libc6. > > Must I create an entirely fresh "testing" install? Or should I be able > to simply overlay my package of interest by adding lines for the > "testing" repositories in my /etc/apt/sources.list and doing "apt-get > update && apt-get install newpackage"? without that major libc6 change, you should be able to run a mixed system, but it is tricky as dependencies change over time. You are probably in my limited opinion, better served to just run two seperate systems for checkingo ut the testing packages at this point. > > As in, is this a reasonable thing to expect to be able to do? > > I tried it, but apt-get wanted to remove all of my kernels. And > somehow, without replacing them, I can't believe this is the right thing > to do, so I interrupted the install. that's because of the libc change. > > But if this isn't the right way to go about using a package from > "testing", then how are they expected to be used? > :) get the source from testing and try to compile your own testing version? check out backports for the package you're interested in. A
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