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The generic question is in the title. A more specific example is this: I have a server running ubuntu (actually xubuntu) v9.04. The svn (subversion) available in the repository is 1.5.x, but I want to install the newer 1.6.x. Is there a "correct" way to upgrade (and keep dependencies, etc.) ?

Please either answer this specific case or the generic one.

* Update * I ended up installing the package from https://launchpad.net/~anders-kaseorg/%2Barchive/subversion-1.6, works for me.

noamtm
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2 Answers2

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If the package is not in the Backports Repository, you could request it to be backport-ed.

Or get the source and make your own (static) build. For easy removal/upgrade either create a package or use checkinstall.

Another possibility is to install the package from someone's launchpad ppa but who trusts a package which someone has complied.

Update: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/831723/where-to-find-prebuilt-binaries-for-subversion-1-6-for-ubuntu-or-debian

Community
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Since we didn't need to backport subversion I can only give a general annswer:

We are using an internal reprepro, it's a nice option to get your own software easily distributed in your company across multiple hosts and even provides gpg signed packages (if configured to).

Of course you need to dive into the depths of debian package development (at times) but it quickly pays of once you have basic steps documented.

Packages already in upstream for which you only need a newer/specific version are very easy to pull in (most of the time). In 90% percent of the cases you can simply get the source and copy the debian directory inside so after a dpkg-builpackage (look up the required options in the manpage) you simply upload it to your repository and can then simply apt-get install the package.

However the documentation isn't exactly colorfull so you may run into problems depending on your knowledge, overall I can say it helped us a lot streamlining our systems since we now have a central place to pull (internal) updates from. You can even configure it tu regularly (or manually) pull updates from upstream repositories and can even have multiple distributions which you can use for internal testing since you probably don't want untested packages from backports.org or the volattile repository to be installed on your server without prior testing.

serverhorror
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