[aclug-L] [debian] Upgrading outside package system

[Carl D Cravens <raven@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Okay, I've got a dilemma I'm hoping to get some advice on. 

I'm running Debian 2.0 (hamm).  (I plan to upgrade to 2.1 (slink) soon,
but it did things it wasn't supposed to do on my test machine (uninstalled
telnet and telnetd without warning) so I'm a little leery of it.)

My version of Perl is 5.004_4, which is what came with 2.0.  I'd like to
upgrade to 5.005_03, which is the latest stable release. (Say there's a
possible bug that I think was fixed in the 5.005_* releases.)  Slink's
version is 5.004_4-7, which isn't new enough.  Potato (unstable
distribution) has the latest 5.004_* version and an *unstable* 5.005_*
version, but not the stable 5.005_03.

On a system that doesn't use packages, I'd just download whatever version
I want and upgrade without a thought.  On Debian, this seems like it's
going to cause me problems.  I can't upgrade to either of the versions
included in potato without upgrading libc6, and I'm leery of upgrading to
libraries out of an unstable package because I don't know what else it
might affect... I'm rather conservative and prefer to stay entirely in
stable versions when I can.  (I just know that certain versions of Perl
are considered stable by the Perl developers, so I feel okay upgrading
that specific application.)

What I really want to do is just download the latest stable source and
compile it myself.  But that means when I come along to automatically
upgrade to slink, it's going to "upgrade" my Perl down to an earlier
version.  I suppose I could just reinstall the newer Perl on top of it
again, but I really dislike that option.  (I'll do it if it's the only
thing I can come up with.) 

The problem is that many packages are dependent on Perl.  If I try to
install or upgrade a package that depends on a newer version than what
dpkg *thinks* I have installed, it'll cause problems. 

Does anybody have advice on how to get around this problem?

--
Carl (raven@xxxxxxxxxxx)