[LUNI] Using (Debian) Unstable packages in Woody

[Martin Maney]

On Mon, Jun 02, 2003 at 02:20:16PM -0500, Robert C. Ramsdell wrote:
> I've recently gotten my Debian Stable box up and running.  However, I find
> that some packages I need (notably printer drivers and Gnucash 1.8.x) are
> only available in Unstable.  Is anybody mixing unstable and woody on the
> same machine, and if so, how has your experience been?  Any hints on how to
> go about it?

Backports, backports, backports.

For easy, try apt-get.org - maybe someone else has done the package(s)
you're looking for already.  Sometimes it's even the package
maintainer; often it's another Debian developer.

If it's KDE 3.whichever, there's said to be a set of packages for Woody
put up by KDE (or KDE developers, or some such).

Then there's the classic backport.  Basically, grab the source package
(.dsc, original tarball, and diffs) from unstable & see if it builds
under Woody.  I've had generally good luck with that approach, but I
don't use either KDE or Gnome... but I am using a backport of X that,
yeah, I really do need to update this sucker someday.  :-/

Actually, that's just a "back-build" - the developer repositories
apt-get.org will take you to may have real backPORTs that needed some
work to get going.

Oh, and you might want to check the proposed-updates section for Woody,
too.  It has the security releases, of course, but may also have
updated packages (which will likely never get into a point release, but
so it goes).  Technically these are no more official than the
apt-get.org stuff, but presumably the developers who placed the
packages there expect them to be up to be fit for the stable line.

The package tools are, as usual, lagging behind what they could do with
all these various sources - no, manually mucking about with pinming
packages isn't really good enough, IMO.  Better than nothing, though.

-- 
Anyone who calls economics the dismal science
has never been exposed to educationist theories
at any length.  An hour or two is a surfeit.