How do I use apt to download and install a specific app version?

[Governor]

I used the method below to install audacity, and the newest version was automatically downloaded and installed.
apt install audacity

Also, when I uninstalled the newest version apt remove audacity
The menu item is still there. Why is that?

How do I download and install a specific version, for example Audacity 2.12?
Thanks.

[bigpup]

Read the menu ->Help ->HOWTO use the APT Package Manager

But understand it is still getting stuff from Debian Bookworm repositories.
So it only knows about stuff that is in those repositories.

Some of the programs are not going to be the very latest versions.
Until the repositories are updated.
some programs may not get updated for various reasons.
Usually dependency stuff not latest needed versions and too many things will be broken, if they do get updated.

[bbbhltz]

The depends on the repos you have in your sources.list (or your sources.list.d folder).

apt has bash autocomplete, so if you have activated testing or Trixie, for example, you can check all the availability versions with

Code: Select all

apt-cache policy audacity

If there is a version from backports you can type

Code: Select all

apt install audacity -t 

and hit tab to see which repos you can pull from, like bookworm-testing.

If you add testing and unstable repos you could do the same.

But, Debian doesn't always play nice. They even have a special Wiki page called Don't Break Debian warning you not to create a FrankenDebian.

I'm guessing you might want something newer?

Add the Debian testing repo and give it a try, but I feel that doing this on Puppy could lead to some incompatibilities.

[fredx181]

The depends on the repos you have in your sources.list (or your sources.list.d folder).

apt has bash autocomplete, so if you have activated testing or Trixie, for example, you can check all the availability versions with

Code: Select all

apt-cache policy audacity

If there is a version from backports you can type

Code: Select all

apt install audacity -t 

and hit tab to see which repos you can pull from, like bookworm-testing.

If you add testing and unstable repos you could do the same.

But, Debian doesn't always play nice. They even have a special Wiki page called Don't Break Debian warning you not to create a FrankenDebian.

I'm guessing you might want something newer?

Add the Debian testing repo and give it a try, but I feel that doing this on Puppy could lead to some incompatibilities.

In general (either if it's puppy based Debian or *real* Debian), better don't mix stable (bookworm) with testing (trixie), sooner or later things may get messy and you can expect big trouble then (FrankenDebian as mentioned).
Using bookworm-backports is OK.

[bbbhltz]

And also, check the official docs. What I wrote is not 100% correct because there is no such thing as bookworm-testing.

You would need to change every instance of the word "bookworm" to "Trixie" or "testing".

I think backports is a much better choice, even though lots of folks use Testing and Sid. Unfortunately, in this case, Audacity isn't in the backports.

[fredx181]

You would need to change every instance of the word "bookworm" to "Trixie" or "testing".

If you change all instances of "bookworm" to "trixie" in /etc/apt/sources.list, it will be a complete upgrade to trixie, e.g. when doing apt update; apt upgrade (also when installing some new software, libc6 will be upgraded in most cases), although I did not test on BookwormPup, I think it's not a good idea to do that as an average user (many issues can occur).

[bbbhltz]

You would need to change every instance of the word "bookworm" to "Trixie" or "testing".

If you change all instances of "bookworm" to "trixie" in /etc/apt/sources.list, it will be a complete upgrade to trixie, e.g. when doing apt upgrade (also when installing some new software, libc6 will be upgraded in most cases), although I did not test on BookwormPup, I think it's not a good idea to do that as an average user (many issues can occur).

I wouldn't do it either haha. But I also wouldn't want to bother with pinning repos because I always mess that up.