i have a debian 2.2r3 box here that is running stable. however, stable is real stable (as, i'm sure most know - with debian), and this can be good, however, it can also hinder progress.
there are a couple of packages i wish to use from the unstable branch, however i don't with to have a "unstable" system. and, some packages i wish to use don't even seem to be in the stable branch. if i add an unstable line to the sources.list, when i do a dist-upgrade, i'll have an unstable system. there are 2 ways that i've thought of to possibly get around them (i haven't tried either yet - i thought i'd test the watters for good ideas): 1. create a user accound, and make a seperate package archive for them, and (if possible) a seperate sources.list file for them, and get whatever unstable packages i wanted using that accound, and then use dpkg -i * in their package directory as root to install them (which - in theory - would handle the packages and their dependancies). 2. have 2 sources.list files, one unstable one stable, when i want a file that is in unstable, i just move the lists around, and when i want to do a dist-upgrade or get a file i want to be stable, just move them back. i have also thought of just getting the package and compiling them, or just downloading the package off the ftp site, however if i were to do that, after a month or so, i'd have to do it again, or the stable package would become newer than the unstable one (which would be a pain). not to mention having to get the dependancies. ANY ideas? my head hurts from thinking about this, so any and all ideas would be appreciated. thanx darkhaven (aka - shawn wilson / kg4gxu)
