On 01 Jul 2006, at 15:07 , Ben Fowler wrote: short answer: Actually this statement was there the first time I looked at the page so I just took it for granted ;-) long answer: my experience from Debian is that mixing distributions is "bad": there is always a point where a version conflict can block your system*. Fink looked a lot like Debian to me (well it's not as good but still, the package management system is the same). Therefore, as Inkscape definitely needs some packages from unstable, I just switched completely to unstable. It implies a lot of compiling (in particular for gtk) but you also get many packages that are not available as binaries (i.e. not in the stable distrib). In addition adding manually a package from unstable implies moving some info files around and I didn't want to go into such things. * when dependencies in packages are of the type foo needs bar >= 2.1.3 the worst that can happen is an unstable package which requires many other unstable ones and forces you to switch completely to unstable. the switch can be painful but you usually can do this. things get nasty when dependencies are like: foo needs bar = 2.1.3. Then imagine package bip in unstable needs bar 2.1.6. in order to install bip you need to install bar 2.1.6 and therefore to uninstall foo. But if many things depend on foo you'll need to uninstall them too. If you let the system compute the dependencies it self you can end uninstalling some important packages (like X for example) and then just sit in front of a blinking console wondering: what have I done wrong? these are worst cases for sure and as fink is a parallel package system on os x it won't as bad so I think in the end it is just a matter of taste. I personally don't like moving info files around and need many packages that are only in unstable. Hence my choice. JiHO --- Windows, c'est un peu comme le beaujolais nouveau : a chaque nouvelle cuvee on sait que ce sera degueulasse, mais on en prend quand meme par masochisme. --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/