Can a repository package be upgraded from outside the repository?

Ralf Mardorf silver.bullet at zoho.com
Sun Sep 11 03:03:04 UTC 2016


On Sat, 10 Sep 2016 20:40:58 -0500, Jim Byrnes wrote:
>When I did a fresh install of 14.04 I choose to install jEdit 5.1 from 
>the repository. I am not ready to upgrade to 16.04 yet but I see it
>has jEdit 5.3 available. I checked and there doesn't seem to be any
>backports.
>
>I the past I have installed jEdit by adding dl.sourceforge to my
>sources list and using apt.  So if I did that now would my present
>install of 5.1 be upgraded to 5.3?

Assuming that there should be no conflicting dependencies, then yes.
However, if a dependency >= is required, so that the upgrade works, it
still could cause issues.

>I don't want to uninstall 5.1 and then install 5.3 because of a lot of 
>customization I have done to 5.1.

Everything in $HOME is kept anyway and as long as you remove and not
purge the package, even configs outside of home are kept.

However, a new version of an app might convert old configs and then they
might be not backwards compatible anymore, so if you need to downgrade,
you'll lose your settings. Some apps require to delete old configs to
work properly.

Solution:

Before upgrading backup all files that are important to you.

  dpkg -L <package_name>

shows all related files, run it for jEdit and all dependencies and
backup the relevant files, also backup the relevant files in $HOME or
backup $HOME completely, so you could restore from the backup, if it
should be needed.

Regards,
Ralf





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