Finding Newer Package Versions (backports)

workflow description

Devuan offers thousand of packages. But ,a package, as time passes, it changes and new versions are released by the package's maintainers ( @) and the upstream project's programmers.

Example. A stable Devuan offers in Daedalus ( @) kvirc 5.0.0 @/pkginfo. But as we see in testing (Excalibur) and unstable(Ceres) 5.2.6 is released. So in a libre-source project's lifetime irregularities in the release cycles are more than common. Looking at the release history of kvirc @ we see that version 5.0 development started in 2017 and released in 2019. And then for 5 years there was no realease until 2024 with 5.2.0. Deadalus was released in late 2023 and thus missed 5.2.0. So installing kvirc would give us a ircclient that doesnt know about the libera network because the freenode fallout happened after 5.0 released.

So assuming that a newer release will improve a given info-process workflow a user would possibly want to keep a stable Devuan and having the newest package release. Having a way to install the latest versions ofcourse cant happen with all the packages. Especially libraries. That could undermine the stability of a distro.

If the developers of Devuan/Debian consider that a newer version doesnt brake the stability the can put it in a special repository location called Backports.

enabling backports

Add Backports to sources.list:

$ nano /etc/apt/sources.list
.....
+ deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-backport main

(alternatevely: add a ".list" extension file to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/).

Then execute:

$ apt update or apt-get update

Checking for backported packages.

precondition : having enabled backports

$ sudo apt-cache policy emacs
emacs:
  Εγκατεστημένα: 1:28.2+1-15+deb12u3
  Υποψήφιο:      1:28.2+1-15+deb12u3
  Πίνακας Έκδοσης:
     1:29.4+1-4~bpo12+1 100
        100 http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-backports/main amd64 Packages       
 *** 1:28.2+1-15+deb12u3 500
        500 http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus/main amd64 Packages

We see in the above output from apt-cache policy emacs that althougth emacs 28.2 is installed ( ***) there is in backports 29.4 available.

Installing a backported package

$ sudo apt-get install  -t daedalus-backports emacs