Ted Harding wrote:
On 30-Dec-09 19:11:47, MJ Ray wrote:
Ted Harding wrote: [...]
Now: Recently, on a Debian system which (from the time-stamps on the earliest user files) seems to have been Debian Etch (April 2009, though I have been following the updates), I installed the xfmail MUA which I have habitually used on a much older system. It was hnot available in the Etch repository, so I searched the web and found and used the deb package
xfmail_1.5.5-3_i386.deb 17-Jan-2006 22:35 951K
and it all seemed to go in; and also, it seems to work. So far so good.
[...]
In view of the above (i.e. Lenny not Etch), would you have any additional or alternative comments?
The ideal solution would still be to update the package.
A second-best solution would be to rebuild the packages from etch on lenny and try to install them, which should be similar to backporting (there must be a HOWTO but I didn't find it just now - basically apt-get source --build packagename) but a little easier.
I think that most of xfmail's dependencies were listed as "weak" on one of the sites I read yesterday - that may be why it works even without the apt dependencies being satisified. A poor third-best solution (if xfmail runs OK at the moment) would be to use "equivs" to Circumvent Debian package dependencies but it's been ages since I used that, so I'm not going to suggest commands which might break your system!
Hope that helps,