Le 08.06.2014 08:40, Thierry de Coulon a écrit :
I guess no Debian package manager likes this mix of origins. I took a look at pinning, but there is no simple solution there either.
I am quite used to play with lot of versions of softwares through aptitude, and never had real problems. Ah, wrong, I had one, recently: impossible to downgrade gcc. I had to use dpkg --force-something to do that. But it was a downgrade of a key part of the system, to tidy an installation that I made with lots of problems ( iso DVD of old testing, netinst of current stable, plus some packages of a cache from another computer which runs testing/unstable/experimental... see the mess? :) ).
Now, things are clean and stable. If I had to achieve the same through pure command-line, I would not have made it, probably I would have reinstalled. Using a minimal system probably helped, as well as knowing exactly what packages I really need ( when my systems have more than 1000 packages, then I know that it's time to remove things ), which I learn by playing with aptitude, installing and removing lot of packgages ( databases, window managers, terminals, games... I really have installed and removed a lot of things, even mandatory packages sometimes. I like tinkering. )
I also have played with pinning in the past. I must admit, I agree with you, it not a very good solution, since you need to progressively add every dependency of the tool you want to upgrade, or automatical upgrades will fail. On my minimalist computers, it's not a problem, but with a big DE, I guess it must be painful. Note that apt* are able to freeze packages, which, combined with pinning give a real control on versions.