Debian Backports How-To

When a package from stable is too old for your needs and you want to upgrade it, you may consider using official Debian backports repository; sometimes though, you may happen to be unable to find a backported version of a particular package.. so: the solution is compiling a sid source package backporting it to the stable branch.

Here comes the correct procedure:

First: See if the package has already been backported. If it hasn't,

1) Add ONLY a "deb-src.." line for sid to your sources.list

2) apt-get update

3) apt-get install build-essential; apt-get build-dep packagename; apt-get -b source packagename

4) install the resultant debs.