Install of package from Experimental? - was installing GRASS7

[Jochen Spieker]

Zenaan Harkness:
> 
> apt-get update
> apt-get -t experimental install grass-core grass-gui
> 
> First it failed,

How? That's the most interesting information that you could have
provided (except for the commands you were running).

> so I installed grass from stable and now I can run this:
> $ grass --version
> GRASS GIS 6.4.4
> cat: /usr/lib/grass64/etc/license: No such file or directory
> 
> So firstly, can someone tell me what that last line of output is (it
> looks very odd to coming out of a Debian package)?

Looks like a bug. The "grass" command may point to a shell script that
uses the "cat" command to display a non-existing license file. I
wouldn't worry about that.

> Now when I try:
> apt-get -t experimental install grass-core grass-gui
> I get the following output:
> Reading package lists... Done
> Building dependency tree
> Reading state information... Done
> grass-core is already the newest version.
> grass-gui is already the newest version.
> 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 6 not upgraded.

Apt is telling you that it thinks there is no more recent version of
grass-gui and grass-core than the ones you already have installed. You
can use 'apt-cache policy grass-gui' to get a list of versions that apt
knows about and what it thinks about them. Please post the output.

> Can anyone help here - I'd really like to start on GRASS7, if possible
> (on Debian stable - would that normally be a "backport" or an
> "update"?).

Well, if there is a backport of GRASS7 for stable, you would find it
here: http://packages.debiam.org/grass-core

You should never attempt to install something from experimental on a
stable system. That is not asking for trouble, that's begging for it. If
you need to install something from experimental, use a separate
installation (possibly in a VM) using Debian sid. And even then you
cannot count on anything from experimental to be useful for anything.
It's mostly a playground for Debian Developers.



J.
-- 
In the west we kill people like chickens.
[Agree]   [Disagree]
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