Ability to change testing branches on single packages

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1

Currently, the best way to change testing branches on a single package is to switch the entire system to the testing branch in question, do a full system update, and then go back to stable (or whatever) and skip the change on the package.

This is not a great way to do it. I’d be better off manually downloading and installing the package.

I understand that the reason this isn’t an option is to avoid package conflicts and dependency errors. This makes sense for kernel packages and libraries, but does not make sense for packages that have no dependencies.

For example, I want the latest version of go (1.15.7-1), but I don’t want to develop my go applications in an unstable environment. Go has no dependencies and is thoroughly tested by Google before release. In this use case, being able to switch just this package to ‘testing’ or ‘unstable’ makes sense.

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You could always set up a container ─ i.e. a more advanced type of chroot environment ─ with the userland from the Testing branch. It’d be like a virtual machine, but with far less overhead, because there’s no emulation going on and the container is running on top of the same kernel as the “host”. The memory footprint and CPU load would be minimal.

In a way, it’s also what AppImage, Snap and FlatPak do.

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3

Are you talking about testing branch? IMHO testing is stable as a rock - except for the name. :upside_down_face:

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4

No. What you’re asking for is not supported and will never be implemented.

https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php/System_Maintenance#Avoiding_Partial_Updates

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