using APT with both Debian and non-Debian sources
I'd love to hear people's comments and suggestions about this. I'm
going to put it on my web page after getting feedback.
# $Id: preferences,v 1.4 2002-07-25 10:42:18-04 roderick Exp $
#
# Using APT with both Debian and non-Debian sources
# ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
#
# APT's Default-Release setting (aka "apt-get --target-release") is an
# extremely useful feature, but it has problems if you're using non-Debian
# entries in your /etc/apt/sources.list file. This file improves the
# situation a bit.
#
# Copy this file to /etc/apt/preferences and edit the following Pin:
# line, replacing "testing" with "stable" if that's your preferences.
# The rest of the file contains an explanation, you don't have to
# worry about anything other than this line if you don't care about
# the details.
#
# ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
#
Pin: release a=testing
#
# ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
#
# The above Pin: is your default release. The way it's set is the
# equivalent of the apt.conf APT::Default-Release setting. It's
# convenient to have it here instead so that all the pinning settings
# are in one place.
#
Package: *
Pin-Priority: 900
# Pin unstable at a lower than default priority. Here's an example to
# show why this is necessary. Consider a package which is available
# from 3 releases like this:
#
# rel. ver. without pin with pin
# ---- ---- ----------- --------
# testing 1.0 900 900
# local 1.1 500 500
# unstable 1.2 500 200
#
# Without this pin version 1.1 installed from local would be immediately
# upgraded to the 1.2 version from unstable, since they're both priority
# 500.
#
# The priority of this pin has to be > 100 (the priority of currently
# installed packages) else a package installed from unstable wouldn't
# track new versions from unstable.
#
# This isn't a complete solution. Say your apt.sources included
# Debian's testing and unstable, plus 3 external sources A, B, and
# C. It'd be nice to be able to install a package from B and have
# it always come from B (or from the default release, if a newer
# version gets there), but I don't see a way to do that without
# listing the other releases here explicitly. Since A, B, and C all
# have the same priority (500, the default priority) a package from
# B can be replaced by a newer one from C. If this is a problem for
# you, the best solution I can currently offer is to add a new pin
# here for each of your external sources. Even then I don't see a
# way to do per-release mutual exclusion, so you'll still have to
# order them. If they don't provide a Release file you should be
# able to use a specifier like "Pin: origin www.somesource.com".
#
Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian
Pin-Priority: 200
--
Roderick Schertler
roderick@argon.org
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