On Mon, Mar 04, 2002 at 02:19:49PM -0800, Liav Asseraf wrote: > I'm not a debian user, but I have a question regarding > the 'testing' and 'unstable' branches. > Are the packages there dynamically linked against the > latest versions of other packages?
Well, that depends... > For example if I install today the current snapshot of > the 'testing' branch. Then for 2 months I don't update > (download) any packages. Then I find out vim 6.1 is > out. > In the meantime newer versions of glibc (say 2.2.5) > and perl (say 5.602) were released. Assuming vim > (gvim) > is dynamically linked against glibc and perl (though > it > doesn't need their latest version), will apt-get must > download the newer versions of glibc and perl. If you do `apt-get upgrade` or `apt-get dist upgrade` to update your vim, then that will download and install the most recent versions of everything. If you use `apt-get install vim` (yeah, I know - vim is already installed; to apt-get, "install" means "install latest version"), it's a little more complex. Packages can have dependencies on specific versions of other packages, so, if glibc 2.2.4 added a new function which vim 6.1 uses, then vim will depend on 'glibc (>= 2.2.4)'. If you already have 2.2.4 or later installed, apt-get will leave it alone; if you have 2.2.3, then it will be upgraded. -- When we reduce our own liberties to stop terrorism, the terrorists have already won. - reverius Innocence is no protection when governments go bad. - Tom Swiss
