> David (and all), > > Thanks for the reply. The part about mixing hand built stuff with > pacages > in concerning as I do this quite often. The number of available packages is > encouraging but, nonetheless, I know occasions will arise. I've had to > build/install by hand X, glibc, postgres, the kernel, gcc, freeamp, and > others because of needing bleeding edge versions that fix bugs or because, > in debugging the current version, I needed a non-stripped binary. > Although the automatic installation abilities of apt sound nice, I > find > that I usually want to actually download the, in my case, RPM so that I can > use it on multiple machines. That is, I question the benefit of this for me. > > Anyway, I wall continue to explore this and, once again, thanks for > the > info.
my 2E-2$: 1) if you keep your custom stuff in /usr/local and don't install the corresponding deb package you won't have problems; 2) you can use apt-get source to get the package source, apply your fixes and recompile (even with -g) the .deb file to install it on other machines (and remember to send the fix to the mantainer!); 3) you can usually find almost-bleeding-edge stuff in testing; 4) give debian a try anyway! pietro.
