Can a repository package be upgraded from outside the repository?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sun, 11 Sep 2016 05:03:04 +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>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?  

PS:

Be careful, a third party repo might also provide new versions of
dependencies, that might cause issues for other apps provided by
official Ubuntu repositories. Pinning is a way that allows you to
manually select packages, but those selected packages anyway couldcause
issues.

>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


-- 
Death of ROXTerm
https://sourceforge.net/p/roxterm/discussion/422638/thread/60da6975/