Selective upgrading of packages

Posted Jul 16, 2012 20:58 UTC (Mon) by foom (subscriber, #14868)
In reply to: Selective upgrading of packages by drag
Parent article: Left by Rawhide

I find selectively pulling packages from unstable quite useful, and usable, at least on a server. Generally, it will want to upgrade a few core packages like libc/libstdc++, but I don't find that to be a problem. It doesn't actually cause a need to upgrade vast swaths of the OS, only the few core packages, and I trust that those likely still work. :)

It's possible that the interdependence of desktop packages might be greater and make it infeasible to usefully do for a non-server package without upgrading almost the entire OS, I haven't really tried that.

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Selective upgrading of packages

Posted Jul 16, 2012 23:04 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

It depends.

If the package doesn't want lots of dependencies then I'll pull down straight from Unstable. If it's something that lots of other packages depend on I usually won't do it and will source code compile.

This is usually how it goes for me when I install Debian stable and find out the software I want to run wants newer versions of something-or-other then Debian provides. In ranking from preferable to not:

1. Check backports.debian.org
2. See if something can be pulled from testing without pulling in a lot of dependencies.
3. Use apt-source and related items to compile packages.
4. upgrade to testing or unstable.