Sometimes a package that you need is not available for Debian Jessie, but you can find it for Sid (unstable). You may be tempted to try to install it manually, by downloading the binary deb package, but it will most likely fail due to binary incompatibilities with different libraries’ versions you have. The better method will be to get the source package used to build the binary package, and build it yourself. Most of the time the process is not as hard as it sounds.
First, a short preliminary setup is needed Add the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://http.debian.net/debian jessie-backports main
deb-src http://httpredir.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib
You can replace unstable with testing if you prefer to use packages from testing. Update the lists of packages
sudo apt-get update
Next you need, to get the build dependencies for your package. The example below uses the package lyx:
sudo apt-get build-dep lyx/unstable
Now you are ready to fetch and build the source package:
sudo apt-get source -b lyx/unstable
Finally, you will see in the current directory the resulting DEBs. Simply install them:
sudo gdebi lyx-common_2.1.4-2_all.deb
sudo gdebi lyx_2.1.4-2_amd64.deb
You can later mark the dependecies that you manually installed as automatic:
sudo apt-mark auto lyx-common
