On Sat, Nov 17, 2001 at 09:51:54AM -0700, Hans Fugal wrote:
> Ok, I made the plunge and went debian at home (thanks to some
> persuatsion of hard disk troubles I had to install something)
>
> I like it but I have a question on apt-get. I have te stable
> distribution, mostly because I don't have as much time to mess with
> things as an unstable would probably require and because my computer's
> old so older packages are probably good. But there's at least one
> packages that I want the cutting edge of - vim. Anybody know how to set
> up apt-get to grab just one unstable package and not have the tendency
> to update all my packages to the latest unstable version? Short of
> adding an unstable line to sources.list for one run - I cuold do that
> but it's not 'the right way' imho.
Woo, another convert! I think you'll be happy with Debian. But
unfortunately, I don't know of a way to track the vim package from
unstable without switching over to unstable. Each package set is more
than just a list of packages, it's a (mostly) self-consistent
distribution with a dependancy database, so downloading vim from
unstable might get you a big chunk of stuff you weren't expecting.
There are a couple of options for you here. First, consider switching
to unstable. I've been tracking unstable for years, and the name is
really rather misleading. Yeah, there are occasionally problems that'll
temporarily hose your system if you blindly upgrade to the latest stuff
all the time. Those are few and far between, though. If you check the
mailing lists or IRC rooms before doing dist-upgrades, you can avoid
those, or fix them if you get stuck.
Another solution, and probably the cleanest one if you don't want to
switch to unstable, would be to grab the source .deb and build the
binary .deb yourself. This will ensure it's built against the libraries
you've got installed, and let you customize it exactly the way you want
it to. I had to do this for a Debian PPC install, since they didn't
have a working vim package for some reason, and it worked great. You
may have to grab a couple of additional tools that help in building
packages, but I don't do it often enough to recall what they are.
Good luck, and let us know what solution you end up using!
--Levi
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