Re: [orca-list] installing orca on debian

[Mario Lang <mlang delysid org>]

Steve Holmes <steve holmes88 gmail com> writes:

> What is the difference between unstable and experimental?

unstable is the distribution you use if you want to be on the
bleeding edge.  experimental is just a sort of staging area
for software that shouldn't go to unstable directly for some reason.
In case of GNOME, Debian has a internal policy of not uploading
development releases of GNOME software (the odd version numbers)
to unstable to not disturb developers machines too much (after all, people
are using their desktop for doing things, and if it would break in
places too often, that would be very anoying).
at-spi, gnome-orca and friends, being GNOME packages, follow this
same pattern in Debian.  So in unstable (which eventually propagates to
testing and finally stable), you will only find stable release version
of at-spi and gnome-orca, something like at-spi 1.22.0 or gnome-orca 2.22.2.

However, right now is a bit of an exceptional situation because Debian
is about to release lenny, and therefore is not uploading GNOME 2.24
packages to unstable just yet to avoid disturbing the release process too much.
Therefore, at-spi 1.24.0 and gnome-orca 2.24.1 did not go to unstable
but to experimental instead, so that users can selectively install these
versions if they need/like to have the latest accessibility stuff running.

However, experimental is not a full distribution, you can't (and really don't
want to) apt-get dist-upgrade to experimental.
What you can do is add it to your /etc/apt/sources.list and tell
apt-get to install a certain package from experimental like this:
apt-get install gnome-orca/experimental

-- 
Hope this helps,
  âââââ