How to load Edgy version of a package onto Dapper?

[Scott Kitterman]

On Tuesday 20 February 2007 08:55, Derek Broughton wrote:

> It's not THAT dangerous.  The Debian packaging system is pretty robust.  If
> doing this from Edgy to Feisty, it would be mildly hazardous, because not
> all of the Feisty packages are guaranteed to work.  The worst that's going
> to happen with an attempt to upgrade a single package from Dapper to Edgy
> is that you'll be told it's going to update your entire Gnome (or KDE)
> desktop to Edgy.  When you see it wanting to update 300 packages, you do
> _not_ respond "Yes" to the prompt!  Even if you do, you now have an
> essentially Edgy system, and you may as well continue with a full upgrade.

Not true.  Packages for Dapper and Edgy (and Feisty for that matter) are all 
compiled against different versions of various libraries.  As long as the 
interface with the libraries is unchanged and the library behavior is 
consistent, your analysis is correct.

The trick comes when this is not the case.  Even if the package installs and 
appears to work initially, there is no guarantee that it won't fail is some 
subtle or unfortunate way in the future.  Binary compatibility is not 
guaranteed between releases.

The safest way to do this is download the source package, build your own .deb 
file locally and install that.

Scott K