Hi, I have only one computer (working anyway), which I use for fairly important information. So, I use the stable Debian distribution on it.
However, I also do development on this machine, so I often need later versions of libraries and so on that I'm using in my projects. If I could just install the unstable versions of those packages it would save me a lot of trouble, because otherwise I wind up having to install from source. The reason is that the unstable packages seem to have the assumption built into them that they will never be used on a stable distr system -- that is they have dependencies on later versions of basic packages. In many cases these seem to be frivolous assumptions. It seems very implausible to me (for example) that compiling libsdl1.1 _really_ requires libc6 >= 2.1.97. I'm pretty sure that, installing from source, libc6 version 2.1.3 (in Debian 2.2) will work. So why this dependency? This appears to exist only to force using the unstable distribution throughout -- not because the software would actually require it. (?) And this happens all the time. But if libc6 2.1.97 is defined as an _unstable_ package, is it going to break my stable distribution? Is it buggy? It should just differ by a patchlevel, right? So, how have people done this before? Is it possible to run a mixed box like this, or am I just out of luck? I suppose I could just acknowledge that I'm going to have to install development packages from source -- but if so, why have the development packages at all? Thanks for any suggestions. Please reply direct or CC me. -- Terry Hancock [EMAIL PROTECTED]