[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >I am new to Debian (coming from Mandrake) and I don't yet know how to >do things the "Debian Way" so please excuse my ignorance and naive >questions. I have tried to read the documentation but the packaging >system is difficult for me to understand with all the different programs >out there (apt, dselect, dpkg).
Quick summary: dpkg is the fundamental package management program. dselect provides a full-screen text interface to packages, and has been around for almost as long as dpkg itself. apt is a more recent development, and automates the downloading and installing of packages and their dependencies; apt uses dpkg as a back-end, and these days dselect often uses apt as a back-end. There are various other front-end interfaces to apt, such as aptitude. >I want to upgrade a package, newsclipper, from 1.17 to 1.28. The >version 1.28 was just uploaded to the ftp pools about a week ago. I >cannot find the 1.28 package by searching the normal package locations >(http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages), only the older version. > >However, I have found the .deb file in >http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/n/newsclipper/ > >My question is, what is the best way to install this package? Should >I use apt-get (if so, how should I modify the sources list?), dpkg, >dselect, etc.? Download it by hand and run 'dpkg -i newsclipper.deb' (whatever the filename is). >Also, newsclipper_1.28 seems to depend on a file liblockfile-simple-perl >that I cannot find anywhere. How should I handle this? liblockfile-simple-perl is stuck in Incoming at the moment, as it takes new packages a little longer to be processed than new versions of existing packages like newsclipper. You can grab it out of Incoming if you're feeling brave (http://incoming.debian.org/), but that's not recommended as those packages haven't undergone the usual sanity checks. Best is to wait for a few days to a week or so and see what happens. newsclipper-1.28 is a package from unstable, by the way; such packages aren't guaranteed to install cleanly on a stable ("potato", or Debian 2.2) system. In fact, due to C library dependencies, it's usually impossible; Perl packages are mostly OK for the time being, although the Perl 5.6 upgrade is starting to make this less true. -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
