[Techtalk] package hell

[Elwing]

On May 7, 2008, at 1:55 AM, Maria McKinley wrote:
>
> Since there is no actual xemacs in lenny (debian testing), I tried to
> compile xemacs myself, and have now have a half-working xemacs. I  
> would
> like to uninstall the package, but I'm really not sure how to do this.
> The xemacs site claims that there is a pkginfo/MANIFEST.pkgname file
> that has a list of all of the files, but I don't have that. I think  
> that
> must be for pre-compiled packages. Assuming that I get it removed, I
> would also like to know the best way to deal with the lack of xemacs.
> I'm getting the feeling that I should edit sources.list to allow  
> stable
> packages, and download xemacs from stable, but I am a little nervous
> about having both enabled. How does the package manager know which
> distribution to get which files from?


How to get rid of xemacs, I can't really help you with, but there used  
to be a script that you could call with make install that would record  
all of the files that were installed (and I can't find it on Google to  
save my life).  You might also want to check if there's a debian  
directory, and you can create a .deb file from the source you have and  
install that.

You want to do something called "Apt-Pinning" [1].  You list both  
sources in your sources.list file.  By default, apt-get will pull out  
the highest version available (in your case testing), but if it's not  
in testing, it'll pull from stable.  You can also force a package to  
install form a specific distribution by using apt-get -t
ex:
apt-get -t stable install xemacs

Elwing

[1] http://jaqque.sbih.org/kplug/apt-pinning.html (although you don't  
need to edit /etc/apt/preferences unless you want stable to be the  
priority)