[nmglug] How to safely replace a Buster/stable package with a Stretch/oldstable package and maintain it?

[Akkana Peck]

Tom Ashcraft writes:
> Clementine audio/music player version 'clementine/bionic
> 1.3.1+git276-g3485bbe43+dfsg-1.1build1 amd64' used by Ubuntu 18.04 flavors
> works perfectly for my particular needs.
> 
> However, on two older laptops for which I most value Clementine's abilities
> for downloading podcasts, the slightly newer/different Clementine version
> [ ... ] always fails with respect to the Music > Add Podcast >
> iTunes Search option.

It would help a lot if you knew why it was failing. Have you run it
from the command line, with any applicable --verbose or --debug or
whatever, to see if it prints any error messages? Keep in mind
that the problem might not be in clementine, it might be in one
of the other libraries it uses.

Configuring apt to pull a newer version of a package is fairly easy,
but I suspect pulling an older version of just one package is much harder.

However, you could download the .deb directly: go to
https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/clementine
Scroll down to "Download clementine", click on your architecture
(amd64 or whatever) and it will take you to a list of mirrors where
you can download the .deb file. Once it's downloaded, you can try
to install it with
dpkg -i clementine_1.3.1+git276-g3485bbe43+dfsg-1.1build1_amd64.deb

There's a reasonable chance that this will fail because it depends
on specific versions of other packages that you don't have, in which
case the problem gets way more complicated and risky. In that case,
another option is to build from source. First get the dependencies:
on one of these older laptops: sudo apt install build-essential
fakeroot devscripts sudo apt build-dep clementine

Then get the clementine source. Since you have inconsistent access
to the internet (been there, done that, sympathize), I'd suggest
getting both the Ubuntu deb-src that's known to work, and the git
version. For the former, see "Download Source Package" on that
packages.ubuntu.com link I gave earlier. Download the
clementine_1.3.1+git609-g623a53681+dfsg-1build1.debian.tar.xz
which you can build following https://wiki.debian.org/BuildingTutorial
For git, do a search for "clementine git source", click on "Clone or
download", copy the URL there, then run: git clone [copied URL]
then follow the build instructions in the README.

If you can't get it working, another good podcast downloader (not
player) is podget. I used it for years until I switched to an
Android podcast player.

        ...Akkana