Compartmentalizing development builds

[Stephen R Laniel]

A lot of us would like to help advance the state of the art
in Ubuntu, but we wouldn't necessarily like to make our
entire system unstable in the process. We might like to get
Firefox 1.0.4 working, for instance, but we don't want to
upgrade to X.org to do so. We want to lower stability
selectively, in other words.

Quite often this isn't possible: a program we want to
install depends on an updated version of, say, libc6, and
updating that version of libc6 means updating all the
packages that depend on it -- which means destabilizing the
whole system.

Wouldn't it be nice if there were some way we could keep two
copies of libc6 installed at once, so that we could keep
most of our software stable and only destabilize it in
parts?

This must be possible, right? It would help everyone if it
*were* possible: developers would get more interested people
who'd be willing to risk the stability of their copies of
Firefox, say, but wouldn't be willing to risk the stability
of Apache.

-- 
Stephen R. Laniel
steve at laniels.org
+(617) 308-5571
http://laniels.org/
PGP key: http://laniels.org/slaniel.key
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