[plug] Gentoo on APC cover disc

[Daniel Foote]

> That is a pretty interesting point. The closest you will likely come to that is the Debian Stable
> distribution. The only "upgrades" that are issued are security fixes which are guaranteed not to
> break stability. I find myself wanting to selectively upgrade individual bits of software at various
> points though, and sometimes that requires additional upgrades. I manage this as best I can by
> keeping a builder chroot around with all the -dev packages, and re-compile the software I want to
> upgrade against the current -stable libraries and dependencies. Then I can just install the required
> .deb on the basic -stable install.

For servers, there is "Debian Backports". They recompile newer
versions of various software against the current stable libraries, for
direct installation into Debian Stable.

This is really useful in cases where you're running Sarge, but want to
easily install MySQL 5 or PHP 5. Just add the appropriate lines to
/etc/apt/sources.list, update, and select for installation. All the
hard work is done for you already.

http://backports.org/ has more information.

(This is really only useful for server-oriented software - they don't
do things like recompile the latest GNOMEs or KDEs for stable).

Daniel Foote.