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Last modified:
oktober 12, 2017
Every now and then I find myself wanting a newer version of some software package. This is the price I pay for using the most stable OS in the world: Debian GNU/Linux. When that happens I first look for binary version in the official back-ports repository.
But for debian-derivate Raspian (Debian for Rasberry Pi), the offical back-ports are compiled for another processor type (ARMv7) than the one in Rasberry Pi (ARMv6) so they will not work. Instead, you can try the binaries from the testing repository of Raspian by including this line in /etc/apt/sources.list.
# testing (binaries) deb http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org/raspbian/ testing main contrib non-free rpi
To install software from it, for example a newer version of git-annex, do
apt-get update apt-get install -t testing git-annex
This will automatically install the needed dependencies for the new binary. Packages that git-annex depend on will be pulled from testing only if their version in stable does not satisify the version required by git-annex, which is a good thing. You don't want to pull in more packages than necessary from testing since those packages are not as thoroughly tested as the packages in stable.