Hi, I'm running Stable right now, but there is a package (twiki) in Unstable that I need to install. What's the safest way to do this without moving my entire system to Unstable?
I was thinking I should change my sources.list to all the unstable repositories. Then do an
> aptitude update
> aptitude install twiki
Then changing my sources back to stable and doing an
> aptitude update
thanks.
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Installing one Unstable package
Why are you thinking about pulling from unstable when you ae running stable? If you are going to pull a package, you should pull it from the next branch up, which is testing.
As far as occasionally pulling a package from the next higher branch, the system you described works fine if the package you want has only a few relatively unimportant dependencies. If you try to pull from the next branch and Debian tells you that it has to upgrade lots of packages to do this, then think twice. Maybe it's better to download the source code and build the application yourself.
On the other hand, Sarge is nine months old now. At some point, you might want to consider updgrading to testing, which despite the name, I find to be extremely stable. Sid is usually pretty stable also, but once in a while a bad package sneaks in and will wreck your system. Many people are willing to take that chance, but they are either the more seasoned Debian user who know how to recover their systems, or less seasonsed users who like to gamble.
Speaking specifically about Twiki, if you search for it at http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages#search_packages you will see that the same version is in both testing and Sid (and no package for stable). !?!?!? The Debian package is dated Sept 2004, which does not give me a warm, fuzzy feeling. You might be better off getting the source code from the Twiki home page.
As far as occasionally pulling a package from the next higher branch, the system you described works fine if the package you want has only a few relatively unimportant dependencies. If you try to pull from the next branch and Debian tells you that it has to upgrade lots of packages to do this, then think twice. Maybe it's better to download the source code and build the application yourself.
On the other hand, Sarge is nine months old now. At some point, you might want to consider updgrading to testing, which despite the name, I find to be extremely stable. Sid is usually pretty stable also, but once in a while a bad package sneaks in and will wreck your system. Many people are willing to take that chance, but they are either the more seasoned Debian user who know how to recover their systems, or less seasonsed users who like to gamble.
Speaking specifically about Twiki, if you search for it at http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages#search_packages you will see that the same version is in both testing and Sid (and no package for stable). !?!?!? The Debian package is dated Sept 2004, which does not give me a warm, fuzzy feeling. You might be better off getting the source code from the Twiki home page.
I actually looked into installing it from source. It uses many non Debian standard directories which would make it a huge pain to configure.
I didn't realize twiki was also in Testing. How would go about installing that from testing without upgrading the entire system to testing. This is a production server so I can't afford blowing it up.
thanks.
I didn't realize twiki was also in Testing. How would go about installing that from testing without upgrading the entire system to testing. This is a production server so I can't afford blowing it up.
thanks.