[Techtalk] dealing with debian

[Mary]

On Sat, Jan 04, 2003, Emma Jane Hogbin wrote:
> Hey all:
> 
> I'm looking for some other folks that rely on package managers for
> their software installations. For somethings like Apache, Procmail,
> fetchmail, mutt, vim, etc package managers are lurvly! But i'm finding
> it frustrating for other things like: Open Office (getting the package
> manager to work) and Mozilla (getting the latest version).

First of all, I assume you're using Debian unstable, because Debian
testing and Debian stable are deliberately a fair bit behind the cutting
edge (they're interested in stability, not newness).

On Debian, you could try the mozilla-snapshot package or
mozilla-browser-snapshot, which are very unstable (they only work for me
about every second upgrade) but are built from new source.

> What do others do for the few pieces of software that can't be done
> with package managers? Do you just install from source and forget
> about the package managers? If I have a package manager that doesn't
> work, should I tell someone or assume that I've missed something? I've
> tried really hard a couple of times but for some reason swearing
> louder and hitting the keys harder hasn't had much effect. :)

Installing from source (or in the case of Mozilla and Open Office, binaries, compiling
the source takes hours) generally isn't too much of a problem. Just put
the binaries and libraries in /usr/local/

On Debian, if there is a problem, you should report it as a bug against
the package. Instructions are at: http://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting

-Mary