[ILUG] Quick (I hope) Debian question

[Ciaran Johnston]

On Thursday 19 July 2007 19:46:23 Gary Pigott wrote:
> I'm trying to get the Asigra Televaulting client app (online backup, very
> nifty, but definitely *not* FOSS) running on Debian Etch (RHEL and SUSE are
> the only supported distros) and have most of the problems sorted (hunting
> down required, but undocumented packages one by one), but I've run into one
> that has prompted a question.
>
> It was compiled against libxerces-c.so.25, but Etch ships with
> libxerces-c.so.27. I could just download the .DEB from somewhere and
> install it, but if you start going down that road, then APT quickly becomes
> useless. I remember seeing somewhere that there's a way to add a repository
> to the sources.list that only gets used for named packages (I need
> libxerces from Sarge, but everything else from Etch), but there's nothing
> in the man page and Google is drawing a blank. Any ideas?

You could:
1. Build the required version from source, installing it in /usr/local - keeps 
your repository sane.
2. Symlink /usr/lib/libxerces-c.so.27 to /usr/lib/libxerces-c.so.25, and see 
if that is sufficient to satisfy your app. It works in some cases, depending 
on the nature of the changes between the two versions.
3. What you are asking for, I think, is something I have only done, a while 
ago, to install newer versions of packages from backports, so I won't be able 
to help you in this case (${SEARCH_ENGINE}ing for "apt pin" might help). 
Looking at the dependencies of libxerces-c.so.25 on sarge, though, you are 
likely to have further issues with libstdc++5 and gcc-3.3-base. That path to 
a world of pain is somewhere I would rather not venture down. But good luck!

Regards,
Ciaran.