How to load Edgy version of a package onto Dapper?

[Scott Kitterman]

On Tuesday 20 February 2007 13:19, Derek Broughton wrote:
> 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.
>

When you say, "The worst that's going to happen..."  I think there is some 
obligation that whatever follows actually be the worst that could happen and 
not something that is generally true.  I agree that generally it will either 
be fine or try to upgrade a big chunk of your system, but other more subtle 
things are possible (even likely if you change libc releases).

> > 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.

Shouldn't yes, but it happens.

> > 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.

The problem is that there is no way to know in advance if it's required or 
not.  If a stable system is important to you, rebuild the package from source 
or do without.  Fortunately in the Debian packaging system this is very easy 
to do.  After adding the source repo for the distro you want to get the 
package from, it's pretty much:

$ sudo apt-get install devscripts fakeroot  # tools used for building
$ mkdir {directory you want your source in}
$ cd {directory name}
$ apt-get source {packagename}
$ cd {packagename}-VERSION
$ sudo apt-get build-dep {packagename}
$ debuild -us -uc  # build the debian packages
$ cd ..
$ sudo dpkg -i {packagename}_VERSION_ARCHITECTURE.deb

Scott K