How to load Edgy version of a package onto Dapper?

[Derek Broughton]

Scott Kitterman wrote:

> 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. 

Generally true.

> Packages for Dapper and Edgy (and Feisty for that matter) are 
> all compiled against different versions of various libraries.  

They certainly are.

> As long as the 
> interface with the libraries is unchanged and the library behavior is
> consistent, your analysis is correct.

Even if the interface is _not_ consistent, as long as the package
dependencies are correct (ie, it only depends on versions with which it
will work!) this should not be a problem.  Admittedly, there are times when
packages don't have all their dependencies correct (for instance, kdar in
edgy depends on a library only available in dapper), but they still
shouldn't break your system, unless they actually start replacing libraries
that you need.
> 
> The safest way to do this is download the source package, build your own
> .deb file locally and install that.

That's always safe, but beyond the requirements of many.
-- 
derek