debain version

[Scott Kitterman]

On Tuesday 30 January 2007 10:17, Derek Broughton wrote:

> Well, I confess to being a software risk-taker :-)  However, could you
> provide an example where it's caused a problem?  I really have never had
> something show up "much later" that could be explained by using non-ubuntu
> packages, and I can't see why they would.  otoh, it's not something I do
> habitually - I need a pretty good reason to go outside Ubuntu sources.
> --

I don't have a recent example since I don't do this anymore.

When I was first using Linux a couple of years ago I was using Debian Stable 
for a server, but needed the Debian Testing version of Postfix.  It worked 
great for a few weeks and then went south periodically.  The advice I got at 
the time was essentially, "Duh, don't mix binaries from different releases".

Mark Suttleworth talks about the issue here (you have to scroll down):

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MarkShuttleworth

Rebuilding from source is actually pretty easy with the Debian package 
management toolset.  It generally goes something like this (using the package 
vlc as an example.... (this is a slightly simplified derivative of 
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CreatePackageFromSourcePackage)

Go to https://launchpad.net/ubuntu and search for your package.  The search 
results will show you what source package it's in.

$ sudo apt-get install devscripts fakeroot  # tools used for building
$ apt-get source vlc  # gets your source package, in my case vlc
$ cd vlc-VERSION
$ sudo apt-get build-dep vlc  # get the necessary packages for building vlc
$ debuild -us -uc  # build the debian packages
$ cd ..
$ ls (and you'll see the .deb file name)
$ sudo dpkg -i vlc_VERSION_ARCHITECTURE.deb

Scott K