Re: [Nano-devel] getting Debian's newest version of nano, a quick solution

[Benno Schulenberg]

Hello Mike,

Op 24-07-2017 om 23:58 schreef Mike Scalora:
> One of my most frequent annoyances is that every time I login to a new
> server VM instance (almost always Debian based) or fresh Raspberry Pi
> image the version of nano is circa 2.2.6. I used to build nano from source
> but the time and dev dependencies are significant on a lean server
> instance and/or whimpy little ARM cpu. For micro SD card based Pis, the
> disk space is also significant.
>
> I'm aware that there advantages of building from source but for me it's not 
> practical is situations the frequently arise in my workflows.
>
> I've tried several methods to install pre-built packages. I'm sure this is
> a more general problem affecting other software but I've not found clear
> set of instructions for updating a package like this to much better,
> current, release versions without building from source.
>
> I'm far from being a linux guru so I thought I would see if anyone had
> some feedback (e.g. "that's a horrible idea", "this will break XYZ") for
> these instructions before I shared it more generally:
>
>      https://gist.github.com/mscalora/8e8ace33e2aaebdaf9ed9261079cc3a5

A few remarks about your recipe.  First, why is the "deb-src" line needed?
Second, why first remove the old nano before installing a newer one?  And
third, in your nanorc you set backupdir but you don't set backup -- without
the latter the former won't have any effect.  (And $HOME should be expanded
by the user to his/her home directory; nano will not do that.)

Instead of editing the sources list twice, I would do this:

  sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

and add this line:

  deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian unstable main

Then:

  sudo nano /etc/apt/apt.conf

and put in this line:

  APT::Default-Release "zesty";

where "zesty" should be replaced with whatever was in the other
active lines of the sources.list file.

Then:

  sudo apt-get update

To see which newer nano is available:

  apt-get --simulate -t unstable  install  nano

If that is okay, install it with:

  sudo apt-get  -t unstable  install  nano

This avoids having to edit the sources.list file twice and running
'apt-get update' twice.  It also allows for easy installing of other
packages from Debian unstable by simply adding '-t unstable' to the
apt-get command.

Benno