Re: Keeping more up to date than Lenny, safely?

[tyler <tyler.smith@mail.mcgill.ca>]

"Dr. Jennifer Nussbaum" <bg271828@yahoo.com> writes:
>
> I dont really want to go "unstable"--the name alone scares me--but at
> the same time i read the release notes for the new Ubuntu beta, and
> its really nice. I *want* Gnome 2.24 (the auto XRandR thing is
> especially nice, ive always wanted multi-head but am skeered to mess
> with my xorg.conf). I _want_ the new version of Network Manager.
> Etcetera.
>
> Is there any way to get this, but without the risk of the system
> breaking every other day? I dont want my life to be about managing the
> system, but im willing to have a little inconvenience in return for
> more up to date features.
>

As I understand it, if there's something you really want, you've got
four options:

You can temporarily enable unstable, install the package you're after,
and then remove unstable again. I do this on very rare occasions, and
only for packages that are pretty much self contained. If I see the
package is pulling in a lot of new dependencies, or updating anything on
my existing system, I cancel the operation and move on to other options.
This is really not recommended.

You can download the sources and compile yourself. Again, this is best
only for things that don't require updating dependencies. Since it's a
bit more work, it's not worth doing for anything that you don't both
need and understand well enough to trouble shoot compilation problems.

You can upgrade to unstable, with all that that entails. (lots of people
seem to run unstable without too much trouble, but I don't)

You can wait ;)


Cheers,

Tyler

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