> I was wondering what all the Debian users out there do about installing
> current software.
>
> For example: I would like the latest version of webmin, mozilla and
> OpenOffice. The problem is that all the packages I find for Debian are
> not the current releases. So I was wondering. Do I just uninstall the
> packages and the install using the tar files? Or do I create tar files
> with alien and install using dpkg -i ?
>
> What do most of you do? The webmin I found for Debian is like 9 release
> behind the current development version. I did try to create a deb
> package from the webmin tar file and then installed the dep package over
> the webmin package that was installed. I didn't get any errors but now
> webmin is not working. Should I have uninstalled the version on my
> system and then installed the deb package or just give up on the dep
> package thing and use tar?
Well, for starters, if you're using development releases of software, you
might as well be using debian/unstable. The reason stable and testing are
so far "behind" on releases is that nothing gets into those distributions
without a ton of user abuse. Unstable is usually pretty good about
getting new development packages into the repositories very soon after
release.
If you still find yourself without a package that you really want, a VERY
handy tool is deb-make (in the debmake package). Basically, you grab a
source tarball of the software you want, untar it, run deb-make in the
source package root, then run `dpkg-buildpackage -b -uc -us -rsudo` to
build a .deb from source. (If you use some command other than sudo to run
commands as root, substitute appropriately.) I've used this numerous
times, especially for doing CVS builds of software that I wanted the
option to easily uninstall later.
HTH,
Levi
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