Re: apt frustration

[Brad <lists@anomie.dhis.org>]

On Sat, 31 Jul 1999, Brian Servis wrote:

> *- On 31 Jul, formasic@coates.formasic.com wrote about "apt frustration"
> > Folks,
> > 
> > I run a little home office network.  Most of it is stable, slink at
> > the moment, but I like to keep some stuff really leading edge (Java,
> > DocBook/Jade, egcs &c).
> > 
> > A simple way to do this would SEEM to be to use apt/deity.
> > 
> > It'd be great to be able to say: keep everything stable according to
> > my CDs and the ftp site, but keep the following packages (and anything
> > they depend on) up-to-date according to the unstable FTP site.
> > apt/deity doesn't seem to be able to do this.
> > 
> > A simple alternative would be to have a local directory that contains
> > just the .deb files I'd like to be unstable, and to include this in
> > '/etc/apt/sources.list'.  That doesn't work either!  I have to add a
> > bunch of support files (the 'Packages' file, and now some other file).
> > 
> > It seems that there isn't a simple way to fulfill my simple, common
> > need.  Can someone make a suggestion?

Install the latest apt (with support for deb-src lines) and use these to
compile the potato packages from source for your slink. Once you've done
this, steal the Release file from somewhere (change if you'd like), dump
all the debs in a directory, touch the override file, and use
dpkg-scanpackages [from the dpkg-dev package].
  # pwd
  /usr/local/debs
  # touch override
  # dpkg-scanpackages . override > Packages

Then, add a line line the following to sources.list:
  deb file:/usr/local/debs /

> Probably the best way is to use the 'hold' feature of dselect.  Get
> your system set up as you want with stable then use dselect to put the
> packages you want to keep the same on 'hold' with the '=' key.  Then
> modify your /etc/apt/sources.list to include the unstable branch.  Then
> only update packages using dselect select method. 

Wouldn't this cause problems with the glibc version difference between
slink and potato? For example, wouldn't you need to upgrade to glibc 2.1
for one of those potato packages, which would then require several other
packages to be updated (i.e. bash).

> I'm not sure what happens if a package you want to upgrade depends on
> a later version of a package you have on hold.

I'm not sure... in the case of the Perl changes in potato, package X
depended on perl-5.005 which conflicted with perl-5.004 (which provided
perl which dpkg depended on, problem!) so even though perl-5.004 was on
hold it was marked for removal. But i don't know what happens if it's a
dependancy that would upgrade the held package.