Debian Lenny frozen [LWN.net]

Debian Lenny frozen

Posted Jul 28, 2008 18:07 UTC (Mon) by vmole (guest, #111)
In reply to: Debian Lenny frozen by MattPerry
Parent article: Debian Lenny frozen

Pinning works, and it can be useful, but the drawback is that you typically end up bringing in new libraries as well as the application of interest (because of dependency chains), and pretty soon your stable system isn't really all that different from unstable. The backports.org stuff is built against the stable libraries, and avoids this problem. Of course, the app you want might not be in backports.org...

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Debian Lenny frozen

Posted Jul 28, 2008 20:40 UTC (Mon) by dmaxwell (guest, #14010) [Link]

What I often do is backport myself.  Add a deb-src line from testing or unstable to the stable

machine then do

apt-get build-dep package-foo
(any libraries or other tools complained about in this step need to be backported as well.
This 
process can get a bit recursive.  If it turns out I'm going to be building 4 or 5 support
libraries or 
worse then I won't bother.)

mkdir package-foo
cd package-foo
apt-get source package-foo
cd package-foo-<version #>
dpkg -rfakeroot -b
dpkg -i ../package-foo-<ver#).deb

backporting w/ pbuilder

Posted Aug 9, 2008 5:09 UTC (Sat) by undefined (guest, #40876) [Link]

may i also recommend pbuilder which makes backporting easier by providing an easy-to-manage
pristine chroot environment for building packages.

using pbuilder on my testing/"lenny" desktop, i backport applications for servers running
stable/"etch" and even desktops running ubuntu hardy/8.04.

i also use apt-proxy for caching packages for both pbuilder and other machines, but it's not
that specific to backporting or pbuilder.

Debian Lenny frozen

Posted Jul 29, 2008 5:01 UTC (Tue) by MattPerry (guest, #46341) [Link]

Shouldn't building LSB compliant packages eliminate the need for pulling in other
dependencies?

Debian Lenny frozen

Posted Jul 29, 2008 14:38 UTC (Tue) by vmole (guest, #111) [Link]

Possibly, but irrelevant. Debian packages are not LSB compliant; that is, they cannot be reliably installed on a random LSB compliant system. Nor is there any intent that Debian packages be LSB compliant. OTOH, Debian can be a LSB compliant *system*, on which you can install LSB compliant packages, which is the whole intent of the LSB: that you can build packages which install on arbitrary LSB compliant systems. It's not meant to be applied to distribution specific packages.

Debian Lenny frozen

Posted Jul 30, 2008 5:16 UTC (Wed) by MattPerry (guest, #46341) [Link]

Well, if OO.o made debs available that were LSb compliant, then they would work on any LSB
compliant distro. Then there wouldn't be a need for each distro to create backports, or to
even have to package the software for their particular distribution.  The OO.o repository
could be added to the sources list and updated directly from the ISV.  This means you could
have whatever version you wanted on your system with little effort.