Re: apt expectations

[David Roundy <droundy@civet.berkeley.edu>]

On Sat, Dec 29, 2001 at 08:29:31PM -0800, Jim McCloskey wrote:
> 
> I have a system that is mostly debian testing. But I have apt set up
> so that apt-get update fetches information about both the
> testing(woody) and unstable(sid) archives. I have /etc/apt/preferences
> set up thus:
> 
> Package: *
> Pin: release a=testing
> Pin-Priority: 900
> 
> Package: *
> Pin: release o=Debian
> Pin-Priority: -10

.....

> But it seems to me that apt-get did not behave according to
> expectation here. I thought that:
> 
>    apt-get install mozilla-browser/unstable
> 
> would automatically bring down the packages from unstable that the
> version of mozilla-browser in unstable depended on.
>    
> Was I wrong in this expectation, or is there something wrong with the
> way that dependencies are calculated for mozilla-browser in the
> unstable distribution?

I believe the problem is (at least partly) that you have a pin priority of
-1 on unstable, which means that apt will never install an unstable
package, unless you explicitely tell it to.  I suspect you probably want a
pin priority of 300 or so.  However, I'm still not sure whether apt will
pull up the unstable library when there is a testing version available...
-- 
David Roundy
http://civet.berkeley.edu/droundy/