[conspire] How to update packages when Deb is behind?

[Rick Moen]

And, one thing you mentioned just sunk in.

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> My present guess is that my sources.list file really was doing
> "testing", but something is amiss with Firefox. I know I have
> downloaded and added SeaMonkey without using apt-get.

Hang on:  So, you did what?  Downloaded a binary tarball like
seamonkey-2.49.3.tar.bz2 via https://www.seamonkey-project.org/releases/ ?
FWIW, it is almost always a significant error to install packages
outside your distro's package regime, and tarballs are pretty much the
worst choice if you _must_ go outside.   Back in 2005, I wrote at some
length about why, so I'll just link to that piece:
http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/weatherwax.html#1

As I mentioned in that _Linux Gazette_ editorial footnote, if you cannot
acquire a fully supported package from your distro's main package
collections, there are still alternatives that are far-less-bad than 
resorting to an 'upstream' tarball made without regard to your distro,
and one of them is carefully selected third-party package repos.

As it happens, the Debian Wiki happens to recommend exactly that
approach, using binary deb packages from a deb repo at the 'ubuntuzilla'
project hosted at SourceForge.net.  

https://wiki.debian.org/Seamonkey

To make it clear, I didn't know that until a moment ago, when I
Web-searched for 

  seamonkey debian package

As I say in my footnote to John Weatherwax's article, I strongly urge
resorting to 'upstream' software tarballs _only_ as a last resort when
better alternatives have failed, and never a first resort.