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I'm currently running Debian testing and would like to install a package only available in the stable repositories. (I'm surprised I haven't come across this issue before)

I could download the .deb directly and use dpkg to manually install it, but installing packages from one release into another is usually frowned upon. What's the best course of action?

EDIT: Zoredache is right, I didn't realize this package has been removed from future versions of Debian as it no longer has a maintainer. It is of course, also pointed out by Zoredache, important to find out why a particular package has been removed before attempting to install it. I've altered the title slightly to reflect the actual issue.

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    It is pretty rare for a package to be dropped. This almost always happens for a good reason. I would hope that you would investigate the reason before trying to force the issue.
    – Zoredache
    Oct 1, 2012 at 22:01
  • from packages.qa.debian.org: "This package is neither part of unstable nor experimental. This probably means that the package has been removed (or has been renamed). Thus the information here is of little interest ... the package is going to disappear unless someone takes it over and reintroduces it into unstable." Searching Debian bug reports will reveal when and why a package was suggested to be removed.
    – aquafunk
    Oct 11, 2012 at 20:48

2 Answers 2

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From #debian on oftc.net, it was suggested I add a source repository for the stable release, then

apt-get build-dep PACKAGE_NAME
apt-get -b source PACKAGE_NAME

as I would if I were building a package from testing/unstable for a stable install. This will build the package against the currently installed libraries on my system, avoiding issues from a binary install.

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(From How to install package version that was removed from backports?)

Its possible to use http://snapshot.debian.org to install packages no longer found in the repositories. From the site:

The snapshot archive is a wayback machine that allows access to old packages based on dates and version numbers. It consists of all past and current packages the Debian archive provides.

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