pinning and groups of related packages
With the setup backports.org used for woody, each package got its own
section of the archive. All dependencies for the main package were added
to this section. This meant that the user could specify a desired
backport in sources.list, and all relevant packages would automatically
be updated.
The sarge scheme arguably makes better use of the capabilites of apt.
But if the user only desires the backport of a single source package,
there might be many pins to set up before apt will install the correct
set of packages. For example, I wanted the bogofilter backport, so I
followed the instructions at http://www.backports.org/instructions.html.
What I didn't realize is that simply changing the priority for
bogofilter isn't enough to pull in newer versions of bogofilter-common,
bogofilter-bdb, or bogofilter-sqlite. So overall, I needed 4 pins:
Package: bogofilter
Pin: release a=sarge-backports
Pin-Priority: 999
Package: bogofilter-bdb
Pin: release a=sarge-backports
Pin-Priority: 999
Package: bogofilter-common
Pin: release a=sarge-backports
Pin-Priority: 999
Package: bogofilter-sqlite
Pin: release a=sarge-backports
Pin-Priority: 999
The situation is similar with udev and lsb-base, for example.
Is there a way to simplify this? It would be nice if Package: would
accept wildcards or a list of packages.
More importantly, is there a way to get apt to do the dependency
analysis for me? That's what it's for. If I have to do it myself in
order to set up the pins, that's rather a lose.
I'm aware I can use "apt-get -t sarge-backports bogofilter", but the
problem there is that it's temporary. So although I can use -t to get
apt to prioritize the backports packages the way I want _once_, it won't
tell me when there are backports.org upgrades available for those same
packages, right?
Jason
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