debain version

[Derek Broughton]

Scott Kitterman wrote:

> On Monday 29 January 2007 22:24, Derek Broughton wrote:
>> Scott Kitterman wrote:
>> > Neither.  Ubuntu is not guaranteed to be binary compatible with Debian
>> > (or any
>> > version).  If you need to do this, get the source package and build it
>> > yourself.
>>
>> ime, that's hardly ever an issue.  Grab the package (_don't_ add the
>> repository to your sources.list) and "dpkg --install" it.
>> Then "aptitude -f install".  If there are no errors, its fine, if there
>> are, then you're going to have to uninstall it and either find an ubuntu
>> package or compile from source.
> 
> IME when it is an issue it tends to come up much later and in subtle ways.
> You are correct that this often (usually even) works just fine, but I'd
> rather invest a few minutes up front and have less downstream risk.  IMO,
> installing binaries from a different distro (or even from the different
> release of the same distro) is not a good practice.
> 
> Different people have different tolerances for different risks, so I'm not
> saying you can't do it that way, just that I wouldn't.

Well, I confess to being a software risk-taker :-)  However, could you
provide an example where it's caused a problem?  I really have never had
something show up "much later" that could be explained by using non-ubuntu
packages, and I can't see why they would.  otoh, it's not something I do
habitually - I need a pretty good reason to go outside Ubuntu sources.
-- 
derek