On 14-okt-2006, at 19:33, Bob Proulx wrote:
Chris Purves wrote:
You can also get newer versions of spamassassin from
debian-volatile, which maintains packages that update often (such as
spamassassin, antivirus, etc). You would need to add the following
to your sources.list (although you'll probably want a closer mirror
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-volatile/volatile-mirrors):
deb http://gulus.usherbrooke.ca/debian-volatile stable/volatile-
sloppy main
Even as a Debian user I was not familiar with volatile-sloppy and
needed to do some research. For the benefit other Debian users on the
list using spamassassin here is a useful thread about it.
http://lists.debian.org/debian-volatile/2006/10/threads.html#00004
I definitely recommend that you upgrade your spamassassin. The
version currently in volatile is 3.1.5. I can't comment as to the
differences between using backports, as others have suggested, or
volatile. You'll have to research that yourself. If you use
volatile, you won't need to update your preferences file, since
there is a very small subset of packages in that repository.
The sarge-backports depot is based on the Testing track. Testing is a
staging area for Stable. That means that a user who only uses Stable
but adds Sarge-Backports can upgrade from one Stable release to the
next Stable release automatically and all of the package
postprocessing should happen correctly. In general when things are
pulled from Unstable, Experimental or from Volatile that is not true
and may require administrative action in order to adjust things at the
next upgrade. Packages may need to be manually added or removed.
Configuration files may not automatically get postprocessing in the
same way as a normal upgrade.
From the debian volitale page (http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-
volatile/):
* Packages in debian-volatile cannot require any package outside of
stable main (or any later version of it) to run or build. Packages
need to be auto-buildable within the same (stable) release. This
constraint could be relaxed for the sloppy archive, on case by case
basis. That needs to be discussed on the list.
* Packages need to be conformant to stable policy; we currently take
http://release.debian.org/sarge_rc_policy.txt as a hint about what is
ok and what not.
* The upgrade path from volatile to the next stable release needs to
be at least as easy as for the stable release; version numbers in
volatile must not be higher than those in testing, for instance.
I understant that to mean that, equal to backports, it should be
trivial to upgrade to the next release.
How the above applies to spamassasin in the two different depots I
don't know because I have not looked specifically. It is probably not
terrible for a "heads up" administrator though. At a guess I would
say that volatile is more volatile and sarge-backports is more
stable. :-)
Bob
Peter
