Re: How to run testing and stay sane?
On Sun, Oct 07, 2001 at 05:04:17PM -0500, Richard Cobbe wrote:
> Greetings, all.
Hello!
> * I've heard a couple of things that suggest that it's possible to run
> testing, with the exception of a few packages from unstable. Is this
> true? If so, how? Obviously, I could do this by manually downloading
> the unstable .debs, but I'd prefer to have apt/dselect keep track of all
> this for me. (Otherwise, I'm back to RedHat---automatic upgrades were
> one of the major reasons I switched to Debian.)
You can have both unstable and testing in your sources.list, and then set
up apt preferences as so:
$ cat /etc/apt/preferences
Package: *
Pin: release a=testing
Pin-Priority: 900
Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 101
This makes testing the prefered dist, but if you manually install an
unstable package (via apt-get install package/unstable), that package will
be automatically upgraded to the lates unstable version each time you
upgrade. You could decrease the unstable priority below 100, which would
allow you to install an unstable package and then have it remain pinned.
Also, you can increase the priority of testing above 1000 in order to get
apt to automatically downgrade down to testing.
These tricks will only work, btw, with the apt in testing or unstable.
This is the way I have things set up at the moment.
> Any other advice would be more than welcome.
Pay attention whenever you upgrade (via apt-get -u dist-upgrade, or -u
upgrade), and if it's going to upgrade a major package (X or libc for
example), then wait, and see what people are saying on this list before
proceeding.
--
David Roundy
http://civet.berkeley.edu/droundy/
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