Subj : Re: GIMP Up
To   : Barry Martin
From : Ky Moffet
Date : Tue Sep 02 2025 15:29:00

BARRY MARTIN wrote:
> Hi Ky!
> 
>   >   > You can stick with 2.10 if you like.
>   >   MP> Maybe.  I wanted to revert back to an older version of some other
>   >   MP> program but it was going to be too difficult to get the old
>   >   MP> dependencies correct.  I had kept it working through a couple of
>   >   MP> upgrades but this one finally broke it for good.
>   > So this suggestion is now too late but at the time you could have used
>   > the apt-hold option to retain a set of files:
>   >         sudo apt-mark hold <application>
>   >         sudo apt-mark hold <associated libraries -- wildcard allowed>
>   > This will also cause an error to be seen later when the system tries to
>   > upgrade these files; just ignore.
>   KM> Having done this in the past... there came a point where I had to
>   KM> unhold it, because it also held some dependency that the rest of
>   KM> the system could not live without and had to be updated. So I had
>   KM> to wave goodbye to the former hold.
>   KM> I have concluded, from this and other painful moments, that
>   KM> nothing should be held if you can possibly avoid it.
>   
> Makes sense.  One possibility that came to mind would be to save the
> hold files somewhere, allow the updating, then restore.  ...I'd probably
> compare the two version groups to see which one(s) the system really
> needed.  ...The more I type that the more it sound like a heck of a lot
> of work that is going to result in a broken system.

That's exactly what would happen.

Now, something I have gotten away with -- for a while our repo didn't 
have SeaMonkey in it. I downloaded the RPM, but couldn't figure out how 
to install it, and in any case it is generally BAD JUJU to install 
programs from outside your distro's repository. (Things are compiled for 
YOUR distro, not for the whole world, and often DO NOT WORK with other 
distros.)

So instead I unzipped it (RPMs and DEBs are just glorified zipfiles) 
into its own folder in my /home directory, ID'd the executable, and ran 
it from there. Worked fine and linux really had no idea it was there. 
How long that would continue to work... well, I figured it would die 
when the OS got too far updated and it could no longer find dependencies 
it needed, BUT it could not take the OS with it.

Ended up replacing that setup (the whole OS moved house to a different 
PC), but it ran that way for a couple years, with no issues.

Naturally, something psuedo-installed like this does not update, since 
the OS doesn't know it's there. SeaMonkey needs updates very rarely, 
there's really only been one major update in the past decade, otherwise 
it probably would have died early and often.

I would guess as seldom as GIMP majorly-updates, it might get away with 
this too.

> Maybe just a dedicated system (virtual machine?), isolated from the
> outside world?

That's actually what you have to do, yes, to make it reliable and not 
bork your system. And if it's just going to run GIMP, for your VM use a 
minimal distro like an old version of Puppy, which doesn't need much RAM 
or CPU, but can perfectly well run last year's GIMP. Or one of the 
DebianDogs (I particularly liked MintPup, with JWM as the desktop, tho 
it is sadly discontinued).

https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/
https://debiandog.github.io/doglinux/index.html
https://github.com/DebianDog/MintPup-Trusty

Or even Fatdog, which comes with GIMP preinstalled.
https://distro.ibiblio.org/fatdog/web/
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