installing selected packages from unstable onto debian stable

Lennart Sorensen lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org
Wed Aug 25 15:50:33 UTC 2004


On Wed, Aug 25, 2004 at 11:25:34AM -0400, Michael Coburn wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
>
> I'm trying to install certain packages from unstable (i.e. Request
> Tracker 3.2) onto a debian stable server, and I need apt to satisfy all
> the related dependancies -- upgrading to perl 5.8.4, among others
> (there's about 30 or so to satisfy).
>
> I have tried with the following lines in /etc/apt/sources.list:
> --------
> deb http://debian.yorku.ca/debian stable main non-free contrib
> deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib non-free
> deb http://debian.yorku.ca/debian unstable main non-free contrib
> --------
> but when I run apt-get update I receive errors when apt is merging the
> packages:
> --------
> Reading Package Lists... Error!
> E: Dynamic MMap ran out of room
> E: Error occured while processing plptools-dev (NewPackage)
> E: Problem with MergeList
> /var/lib/apt/lists/debian.yorku.ca_debian_dists_unstable_main_binary-i386_
Packages
> E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.

The handy dpkg bot on irc.debian.org's #Debian channel has this to say:
11:44 <LSorense> mmap
11:44 <dpkg> it has been said that dynamic mmap is "E: Dynamic MMap ran
out of room" when using apt-get, put the following line into your
/etc/apt/apt.conf: 'APT::Cache-Limit 12582912;' . if you still get
the same error, increase the value. if that file doesn't exist add it,
or put it in a file in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/

It happens because the apt on woody never expected to deal with 15000
packages that are now in sarge and runs out of memory for it's cache.
The above setting changes the default to something larger that should
help.  People have also run in to this if they have a lot of unofficial
apt sources they get packages from.

> --------
> I've tried firing apt-get install -t unstable request-tracker3.2 , but
> not surprisingly it tells me that the package cannot be found.
> 
> Am I going about this the wrong way, is there some other method to pull
> packages from unstable & satisfying dependancies without upgrading whole
> system to unstable?  I've also considered commenting out the stable line
> in sources.list, but I'm not keen on upgrading other packages than what
> I really need to run Request Tracker 3.2.  I guess I could always pull
> down individual .deb packages for each of the dependancies, but that
> seems terribly inefficient, and prone to error.  Finally I've looked at
> "Tracking a distribution using APT" in the debian reference manual, but
> it's not clear to me the benefit of pursuing this line of action against
> unstable.  Thoughts anyone?
> 
> Any help would be appreciated.  I do apologise if this has already been
> covered in a previous posting. I tried to search the list on gmane but
> it kept timing out. :(
> 
> Thanks again in advance,

If possible, you should get it from a backports source since then it
will have been rebuilt to use the libs that are already in woody rather
than having to upgrade the majority of woody to another version just to
install one program which most likely doesn't really care which version
of the libraries it uses.

Check www.backports.org and www.apt-get.org

Woody (stable) and sarge (testing)/sid(unstable) are so far apart (over
2 years) that very little is in common between them.  Mixing packages
between them is really not a good idea.

Lennart Sorensen
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