Is it safe to change my Lucid sources to Maverick, to get one app, then revert to Lucid?

Solution 1:

No, it's not safe. Evolution will pull lot's of updates that can break nearly anything. Looks like a fun thing to try in a Virutal Machine (with snapshots) anyway.

Solution 2:

It is not the best way but will eventually work for some little application.

But: evolution is definitely more than "just a simple single app". It has dependencies to the evolution-data-server, to many different newer gtk-libs, and so on. Especially since evolution got many refactoring for the move to gnome3.

I don't think this is a good idea.

Solution 3:

Though i would not recommend it either, there is a mechanism called pinning (Just in case you ever want to install a more recent version):

Pinning is a process that allows you to remain on a stable release of Ubuntu (or any other debian system) while grabbing packages from a more recent version.

(https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PinningHowto)

Solution 4:

If for evolution only the better way would be to add an appropriate ppa e.g.:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jacob/evo230

and install from there (in case you trust this ppa). Mind that Evolution may not exactly work the same as in Maverick and that installing other dependencies may cause instabilities to your system.