Dear Debian guru out there in cyberspace

I just installed Sarge and had a relatively easy time. The problem is that to compile the stats package 'R' from source, I need the readline and ncurses development libraries. I search with Aptitude, but I don't find any options to install them. I must need to change something, right? Install from the testing distribution? I put it in my sources.list, but it didn't seem to help.

Here is my sources.list file:

#deb file:///cdrom/ sarge main

deb ftp://mirror.switch.ch/mirror/debian/ stable main
deb-src ftp://mirror.switch.ch/mirror/debian/ stable main
deb ftp://mirror.switch.ch/mirror/debian/ testing main
deb-src ftp://mirror.switch.ch/mirror/debian/ testing main

deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main
########################################################

Could you please suggest what I need to do so that I can install these packages?

Thanks in advance

These are probably the packages you want.

libncurses5-dev
libreadline5-dev

You should be able to get them with apt. If not, you can download them from the above pages and install with dpkg.

Development files almost always have the same name as the library package with "-dev" attached. I found these in seconds in sid with "apt-cache search". Then I just backtracked to the stable distro.

And it's usually not a good idea to go mixing stable and testing distro sources unless you really know what you're doing.

Thanks David

Isn't the world beautiful, (mostly).