[clue-tech] Debian musings [was installfest]

[David L. Anselmi]

Collins Richey wrote:
[...]
> 2. I haven't checked the levels of MySQL and PostgreSQL carefully, but
> I know that Etch installs Postgres 7. Since I have existing MySQL and
> Postgres databases, I'll have to resolve that first.

aptitude install postgresql-8.1

> 3. I've gotten spoiled by Ubuntu. They make the latest versions
> (installed alongside the approved versions) of things quite easy to
> get without monkeying with the base. How does one accomplish the same
> thing with Etch/Testing?

The default wait for a package to go from unstable to testing is 10 
days.  So I think you'll rarely find anything that's newer in Ubuntu 
than in testing, unless you're looking at beta releases.  If you have to 
be that new just use unstable.  It will break more often but won't be 
any more painful than several dist-upgrades every 6 months.

> How can I (reliably) add Postgres 8 PHP5, etc,. etc. without
> upsetting the applecart? I presume these packages are in Unstable,
> but I don't want to convert to Unstable, just have later versions of
> a few things.

You can arrange to use both testing and unstable sources.  It isn't hard 
but you have to read the howtos to make sure you get the right default 
version.  And you probably want to have a good handle on using aptitude 
so you don't get confused about why dependency resolution is behaving 
strangely.

But I don't think you need to.  postgresql and php5 are both in testing. 
  Get to know the page at:

http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages

The only reasons I've used a testing/unstable system (that is, both 
versions) is to get fixes for packages I had bugs against.  Mainly bash 
that had an annoying history search bug and was held up from testing for 
a few weeks because it wouldn't build on some other architecture.  But I 
had lived with the bug for months so a few weeks wouldn't have mattered 
(I did want to verify that the bug was really fixed though).

I also use unstable to get source packages to try out patches (but even 
then I usually build them in a testing environment).  I don't think 
either of these applies to you.

Dave