Debian User Forums

rickh wrote: You are simply proposing what Debian already has ... Testing/unstable, and you want to change the name to Stable+.

Not at all. Or, can you please give me the simple command to install Ardour version 2.7.1, which of course does not mess up the Etch version 0.99.3-1 (and not its dependencies)?

Um, Debian is setup with a community collaboration testing out newer versions and new software. It is entirely community based and developed.

Sure, there are protections setup so that you or I, not community members who chose to go through the process of becoming Debian developers or maintainers, cannot simply package up and impose, let's say that version of ardour, on the entire community until those who have volunteered to work on that kind of thing have gone through the process.

I like that protection. Folks who want their computers and software to keep working appreciate it too.

If you want stuff in faster, go ahead and join the volunteers who help manage that sort of thing for that package, get it into experimental for now, and wait until all this freeze stuff is over with so you can help us work on the next stable version of Debian (squeeze at that point). Package Maintainers and developers are always in need of more talented folks to help out.

See, we're all setup quite nicely already. I can understand the frustration during freeze time, but thanks, but no thanks, we choose Debian. A fork is welcome. I recall Ubuntu is doing quite nicely with its fork.

Seems to me you'd be quite happy during non-freeze periods with things just as they are. New and updated software and versions come in almost immediately to unstable. They are tested and, within the realm of possibility, made able to be placed into testing. And we get most stuff faster than any of these other 6 month release distros.

fanotto wrote: Not at all. Or, can you please give me the simple command to install Ardour version 2.7.1, which of course does not mess up the Etch version 0.99.3-1 (and not its dependencies)?

./configure
make
make install

Or set up backports...

Why are we discussing this again?

Let's not be rude to him - especially since nobody here's given a working answer. As a matter of fact, the capability already exists to do what he wants - look up debootstrap and schroot.

Eck wrote:Um, Debian is setup with a community collaboration testing out newer versions and new software. It is entirely community based and developed.

Sure, there are protections setup so that you or I, not community members who chose to go through the process of becoming Debian developers or maintainers, cannot simply package up and impose, let's say that version of ardour, on the entire community until those who have volunteered to work on that kind of thing have gone through the process.

I like that protection. Folks who want their computers and software to keep working appreciate it too.

Thanks a lot for answer. I too like that protection, most at the time and for most of my software. Yet I, like many others, do use anyway some software not under protection of Debian developers/maintainers. I do not see how it could hurt to have a more anarchist and open collaboration on such software. I believe it would help the official maintainers too. Allso it might attract some people to become real maintainers or developers.

Eck wrote: If you want stuff in faster, go ahead and join the volunteers who help manage that sort of thing for that package, get it into experimental for now, and wait until all this freeze stuff is over with so you can help us work on the next stable version of Debian (squeeze at that point). Package Maintainers and developers are always in need of more talented folks to help out.

Question. Is there any possibility to install packages from experimental without replacing the older packages of same kind?

Eck wrote: See, we're all setup quite nicely already. I can understand the frustration during freeze time, but thanks, but no thanks, we choose Debian. A fork is welcome. I recall Ubuntu is doing quite nicely with its fork.

Agree, there are indeed good structures making Debian as good as it is. Still I believe the best could allways get better. I am sure my proposals, or some similar, would make Debian even better. A complete fork would not be necessary, only an application ( taking care of building/installing software, without touching existing packages) and community system (web site for collaboration on the build files) running on top of Debian. That might be a good idea. That is if more people than my self are intrested.

BioTube wrote:Let's not be rude to him - especially since nobody here's given a working answer. As a matter of fact, the capability already exists to do what he wants - look up debootstrap and schroot.

Thanks. Iooks very helpful.

No rudeness intended. Just a big mouth sometimes.

You can actually install software in its own protected environment. Many do this in their own home directory, and of course there is also the way of just installing the dependencies and compiling into /usr/local, which wouldn't be touched by the package manager either.

Compiling I've done. Stuff like gfce Ultra NES emulator gui, emovix, the Glide64 plugin for mupen64 to get a newer plugin version, little stuff like that.

A fellow poster, Issyer, used to have a web site guide (it's likely still up) to installing stuff like OpenOffice.org and even KDE into its own chroot home environment (something like that). So yes, we're running Debian but we do have users who sometimes like to live outside of the repository box and use different software.

I install the VirtualBox and VMWare binaries downloaded from their websites rather than just sticking to an older version of virtualbox-ose without the USB support and, of course, VMWare needs to be gotten from outside of the repos too. I do install them to /usr/local so as to not have them be interfered with by aptitude.

It's a GNU/Linux system. The bulk of things are available right in the repos, but we have the freedom to use the available tools to do other stuff if we want to. Debian has lots of tools to accomplish these things pretty easily.

So yes, you can have several versions of things at one time if you wish. It just takes reading a bit about the process and being careful. You can't expect aptitude to be able to keep track of that sort of thing, so no, you can't install both an experimental package and the one from your main distribution repo at the same time using package management, but you can build from the source or install into a chroot environment while still keeping another version in your normal environment.

It's not for me since I'm pretty much happy and willing to wait sometimes for things, but nothing's stopping those who may be interested from discussing and experimenting together. It's free software. Make what you will of it as long as the licenses (sharing changes, etc) are observed.

fanotto wrote:This is the question for many Debian users. We use Debian because of stability but want more up to date software in different areas. The key to faster stable versions of software, by large part, is more testing of new unstable software. So I would want a subsystem on my computer called latest. Latest because in this system I can install the latest version of libraries and applications, and without hurting my stable Debian. With ease. I thinking maybe some sort of Gentoo system on top of Debian where anybody with a little knowledge can make and submit ebuilds (debuilds?) without waiting for an official package maintainer. Maintream users could with ease install these builds. Everybody could send their bug-reports upstream and to Debian package maintainers. I think source distribution seems helpful because hackers might browse the code for errors, having the code on their computer after all. And the build files would be faster to upload/edit, than to manage compiled binaries for the different archs. Have to admit I do not know the apt-build system very well. It might or might not fit my suggestions over.

Personally I would allways have latest Gimp, Blender, Code::Blocks, and a few games. Others would have other applications. Some would make Gnome or KDE, others maybe make the base/kernel and fire it up as virtual os. I think, if done right, this kind of testing in a Debian net-tools-package system really could help Debian with faster progression and more up-to-date releases, yet stable as ever.

Perhaps you could dual-boot? Or run VM's?

The idea reminds me of zeroconf, which looked very interesting to me but I think never took off. The problem is that a large number of packages will pull in trees of dependencies which would have to be managed in parallel to other versions.

Take a look also at solaris containers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_Containers

And zfs snapshots:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS

And going off on a tangent:
http://kitenet.net/~joey/code/etckeeper
Etckeeper automatically versions your /etc directory for you so you can track config file changes - which I like very much. Perhaps something could be set up that keeps at least a few versions of your whole system under version control. Mercurial lets you jump to any revision of a tree of files with a single command. Not sure how it would cope with the entire filesystem (and deal with permissions and special files etc.) - but perhaps it's worht experimenting with.

fanotto wrote: Can people stop pointing to Sid, Testing or other distros. Do you like my proposal or do you not? Why?

I like it. I am not particularly fond of the idea of jumping on the testing or Sid update treadmill just so I can have more recent versions of a few programs. I think something like this could be very helpful to people who are still on dial-up.

Unfortunately, I don't think your idea is really feasible at this point in time. I am not saying that it can't be done (I don't really know for sure), but that it is unlikely to accepted and incorporated into the Debian GNU/Linux distribution.

BTW, you may find this interesting: HOWTO: Up-to-Date Software on Etch

Phil

http://nixos.org/
This could be what you are looking for. I just found out about it. I really dont see the need for it though, and it will add a lot of overhead.