[clug] Debian any good?

[Antti.Roppola at brs.gov.au]

Brad Hards wrote:

> 1. Has the installer for Debian progressed beyond boot-floppies yet? What is 
> the right magic download to get something that I might be able to make work?

Boot floppies? I either boot the CD or use RARP to boot from the network.
Besides, I've only built two systems this year, so I don't see the installer
very much anyhow.

> 2. Is there some guide on doing parallel development without screwing the 
> dependency system? For example, if I'm working on KDE, can Debian handle 
> the .deb versions in conjunction with some stuff compiled from source?

For PostGIS, I used apt-src to grab the Postgres source, patched it, then
built a .deb. Was quite neat in that I could back it out and put the regular
.deb back in. I also wedge stuff in manually (make install), but don't expect
package management to realise that this has happened. At least once I have
installed a packaged version, then manually installed a more recent version
so that the package manager believes that something exists.

Antti