How to install "testing" packages
 

Hi,

I'm using Debian Linux woody. When I install packages with apt-get I always get the stable release which is in general a quite old one.

In my case I want to install the "mailscanner-package". The stable package ( 3.13.2-4) doensn't work correctly, so I wanted to install the testing package which contains mailscanner 4.22.5-3. But I get dependency problems that mailscanner 4.22.5-3 needs libmime-perl >= 5.411-2 but I have only libmime-perl 5.411-1. But libmime-perl 5.411-2 is a testing package too.
So how do I get those dependency problems fixed?
Is it possible to install some (not all) packages from testing and others from stable?

Thanks for your help.

Grettings,
hotel-lima

Well, there's apt-pinning to do this - however, sarge (testing) is using the compiler GCC 3.3-1 while woody uses 2.95, see here. You might run into several problems here.

Thus, you better use backports to get new versions of certain software packages, see apt-get.org or google. For example, apt-get.org has no results on "mailscanner" but "+mailscanner +backport" in google shows some hits, one of it is here.

Usually, you have to add repository mentioned to your /etc/apt/sources.list and run "apt-get update". Running "apt-get install <your_software>" then updates the package and its dependencies. The disadvantage of so doing is that "apt-get upgrade" might install newer versions you didn't wanted, so be careful what you write into your sources.list

To avoid this, you can download each package from the backport adresses and their dependencies to build a local repository. This is a little bit of work but worth the effort sometimes.

If you can't find a backport of your wanted software, you can also build one yourself. This is easier than it sounds in most cases.

Have fun.

An even better idea by far is to chuck Woody altogether and upgrade to either Sarge or Sid (I'd personally recommend this one as this has the packages that are most up-to-date) proper. Just change the 'stable' lines in your sources.list to 'testing' or 'unstable' and type apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade and wait.