Re: Is the stable/unstable split broken?
On Sun, 28 Jan 2001, Russell Nelson wrote:
> Here's the problem as I see it. I want to run an operating system
> where I get to choose the level of instability. So, when I run
> "apt-get update", I only want to get stable packages downloaded. On
> the other hand, I want to be able to run Python 2.0, for example.
> Debian's only answer is that I should either install 2.0 in
> /usr/local, or else upgrade to unstable. The first makes me wonder
> what problem dpkg is supposed to be solving, if the first answer to
> any problem is "work around it". The second is unacceptable for the
> reason I just outlined.
Although I haven't tried it myself, I know many people have used another
alternative and have had no major problems: Change sources.list to point
to unstable, apt-get install X, and change sources.list back to
stable. Possibly, since this works when done in this way, maybe it could
be automated somehow. Especially with package pools now, it theoretically
shouldn't be much of a problem to have apt track the status of certain
packages in unstable while keeping everything else in unstable. Of course,
certain cases where glibc is a different version might be
problematic. Anyone see other problems with this idea?
----
Jonathan Eisenstein
jeisen@mindspring.com
PGP Public Key: http://www.mindspring.com/~jeisen/pgp.asc
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