Re: Debian 2.2r3 apt-get & dselect -> testing

[Helmut Trinkl <helmut.trinkl@utanet.at>]

On Thu, Sep 27, 2001 at 02:46:14PM -0700, Jaime cristerna Avila wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 25 Sep 2001, Jason Boxman wrote:
> 
> .....
> 
> > There are "unofficial" XFree 4.x packages for Potato.  Perhaps search
> > the list archives.
> 
> .....
> 
> 
> Thank you Jason for your reply.  I considered your suggestion but was 
> not pleased with it.  If I choose to do it this way, it means that I would
> have to rely on unofficial packages and Apt/dselect wouldn't have access 
> to updates or bug fixes provided by the debian distributions.  What if I
> wanted to add another package other than X that is not in "stable" but
> found in "testing" or "unstable" and leave the other "stable" packages as
> is in my installation.  So far, it seems like there is no mechanism with
> debian to do this.  Am I wrong?  I hope so.
>

I have found this information on newbiedoc.sourceforce.net (thanks to
the author Will Trillich):

   Starting in 2001 a new distribution of Debian is available. It is
   called testing, and it covers the ground between stable and UNSTABLE.
   Testing is made of packages that have survived 14 days in unstable
   without breaking. Major life-threatening bugs are thus solved before
   making their way into testing. However, that also means that security
   upgrades are also at least 14 days behind schedule...

   However if your version of apt supports it ( >= 0.5 ), there is a
   very easy way to follow multiple distributions, it is called pinning:

   You must modify /etc/apt/preferences and add:
1 Package: *
2 Pin: release a=stable
3 Pin-Priority: 900
4
5 Package: *
6 Pin: release a=testing
7 Pin-Priority: -10
8

   then you must add lines for both stable and testing to your
   /etc/apt/sources.list and do an apt-get update which will download
   the usual files twice, one for each distribution.

   After this, you can use the -t option to choose which distribution
   you want to get packages from:
   # apt-get -t testing install sgmltools2

   The Pin-Priority fields ensure that unless you specifiy it manually,
   all packages will be taken from the stable distribution (of course,
   dependencies are always met, so you might have to download more than
   one package from testing)


Maybe this helps.

Helmut