installing selected packages from unstable onto debian stable

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Aug 25, 2004 at 12:24:41PM -0400, Michael Coburn wrote:
> Much thanks Lennart, I was hoping you'd be available to comment.
> 
> 1. your suggestion to bump up the cache limit worked.  Thank you. :-)
> 2. Neither backports.org nor apt-get.org have request-tracker. :(
> 
> I've issued the command apt-get install -t unstable request-tracker3.2
> and have received a listing of 33 upgraded packages, and 63 new ones
> (Request Tracker uses over 160 different perl modules!).  95% of the
> packages are perl-related, so I'm ok with mixing these versions on this
> server.  The only two that concern me are upgrades to:
> libc6
> libc6-dev

Once you upgrade libc, you are NOT running woody anymore at all.

If you go that far, you may as well upgrade to sarge and stick with it
until it's released (which should be sometime this year).

I suspect requesttracker is in testing (sarge) at probably a very
similar version if not the same as in unstable.

> apache
> apache-common
> 
> I'm not overly worried about apache either, as unstable only takes it
> from 1.3.26 -> 1.3.31.
> 
> Before I select "Y to proceed", I'm curious if I'm about to pooch the
> system by mixing versions of libc6 (stable = 2.2.5 , unstable = 2.3.2). 
> Is this a critical issue?  Does libc6 get upgraded, or do two versions
> remain on the system, and the related apps that were built with each
> version "know" which one to use?  Will it be possible to downgrade?
> 
> Also thanks Gilles for your suggestions.  see #1 above for the fix.

It is certainly possible (quite likely really) that a libc upgrade can
break programs if they expect a different release entirely (2.2 vs.
2.3).

If you are going to upgrade libc, I say upgrade it all (to testing, not
unstable).  The majority of packages in unstable can install on testing
with very little impact on other packages in general.

Lennart Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml