[wellylug] Debian vs Debian Woody

[David Antliff]

On Sun, 27 Feb 2005, Steven Mulvay wrote:
> If I did start off with Woody and then I did find that I wanted to run 
> the latest version of some particular packages, couldn't I just go to 
> the 3rd party websites of those packages, download the latest version 
> and then run the latest version under my Woody OS? For example, can't I 
> run the latest version of VLC (downloaded from VLC's website) under 
> Woody? Or does that cause kernel incompatibilities?

It's more to do with the dependencies of a package. Say that your bleeding 
edge package ABCD requires a newer version of, say, glibc to work, so you 
upgrade glibc, then find that packages JKL and XYZ also require upgrading 
to work with the new glibc. This ends up pulling in lots of packages and 
you're no longer running Woody any more. Welcome to Sid.

The kernel isn't usually a problem except for special sorts of 
applications and drivers.

And if you go for compiling from source, some won't even compile without a 
compiler upgrade. That alone might pull in a lot of new packages.

That's the main reason I use Debian Sid on my 'server' - I have an 
unhealthy fascination with bleeding edge software and running Woody would 
be a near impossibility.

If you stick with packages that are built against Woody's library set, you 
won't have these problems, but good luck finding those.

-- 
David.