DSL Ideas and Suggestions :: DSL based on new Debian stable?
I don't know how DSL distros are constructed (if they're built up from Debian packages or chopped down from an existing Knoppix distro, but I'm wondering how difficult it would be to get the packages included in the next DSL release in sync with Debian stable?
Right now, DSL packages seem to be somewhere between oldstable and stable which makes getting *-dev packages needed to build new apps somewhat difficult. For example, apt-getting xlibs-dev won't work for oldstable because it wants an older libc6 and getting it from stable forces an upgrade to a newer libc6. Debian stable will probably remain in it's current state for the next two or three years so it's not like tracking it would be trying to hit a fast moving target 
Some thoughts...
It's probably easiest to avoid buildling packages for DSL from source because of the problems you mention... that being said most of the packages I build are from .debs from stable/sarge... I carefully determine the requirements, what is not included in DSL currently then extract the necessary .debs, delete uneeded files (docs, etc) and then create a DSL.
Of course I have a create a BASH script for every package I maintain to make this process automatic.
You might want to checkout http://snapshot.debian.net as well. It's not the perfect answer to this problem, but it allows you to go back in time and fetch different versions of any Debian package.
Also, dependencies like libc6 don't necessarily always have to be 100% in sync... for example I build a small program jsut the other day on my Ubuntu Hoary system, copied the executable and 3 libraries right from Ubuntu into a DSL that I packaged and it works great!
As far as upgrading the entire distro to stable/sarge... what people don't think of is as everything gets newer it also gets larger... it may in fact be impossible to fit the exact same tools into DSL at the sarge version level compared to the oldstable version level most things are at.
original here.