Alternative title: Backporting a package to your Debian-based distribution.

No guarantees on this being the right way to install it. :-)

My Ubuntu-derived distribution didn't come with the newest version of all the packages I want, even though they exist in the newest Ubuntu versions. The package I'm using here is guile-2.0, but it may work with other packages, too.

Download the two source files from http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/g/guile-2.0/:

debian tarball Source tarball

Unpack both tarballs, put the debian directory into the source directory where the ./configure script is.

Go into the same directory, do

debuild -us -uc

You may need to install some dependencies for building this.

This will take a while to build. When it's done, you can find deb-packages in the directory one above. Install with

dpkg -i *.deb

A more complete explanation can be found in the packaging-tutorial package (apt-get it). The "rebuilding dash" example is what we do here.