apt preferences semantics (was Re: Shall I upgrade to Woody?)
On Wed, Oct 17, 2001 at 10:04:33PM -0700, Osamu Aoki wrote:
| On Wed, Oct 17, 2001 at 06:03:55PM -0400, dman wrote:
| > Sometimes I point my sources at sid. Not all packages are in woody
| > (eg galeon, recent gnucash). I adjust source.list, run 'apt-get
| > update' to update the database, 'apt-get install <foo>' to install
| > foo, put sources.list back, run 'apt-get update' to update the
| > database. This last "update" makes the woody stuff be the newest that
| > is known (aside from the installed stuff).
|
| I used to do this. Do not. Check "man 5 apt_preferences".
|
| It is much more reasonable to have testing as default (Say pin 700) and
| unstable as pin 600, stable as pin 500. List all 3 sources in
| sources.list. If you really nead to upgrade to unstable, you can do
| that with:
|
| # apt-get -u -t unstable dist-upgrade
|
| See my web page below for some of my experiences.
Good info on your web page. I copied your sample preferences file.
It doesn't seem to work "right" on my desktop, but it does work on
this laptop. I once accidentally upgraded to sid on the desktop so
that is probably why it isn't right.
However, it doesn't seem that apt does what _I_ want it to do right
now. I want to follow woody, except for a couple things that are
only available in sid. So the semantics I want are : install package
from sid plus deps. Everything else is woody. When that package
eventually gets to woody, have the package follow woody and not sid.
It seems from the man page that once I install something from sid I'm
stuck with sid for that package, unless maybe I explicitly force the
package(s) to woody. The modify-sources-install-return-sources has
the semantics I want, except that I have to remember to return my
sources.list (which I forgot once on my desktop).
I just installed galeon and mozilla-psm (neat!) using the preferences
stuff. When I tried
apt-get -s install galeon
I was told that lots of stuff was too old. When I did
apt-get -s -t unstable install galeon
I was told that lots of stuff not needed by galeon would be installed
too. I eventually did a
apt-get install galeon <package1>/unstable ... <packagen>/unstable
to get all of galeon's dependencies. While it worked, I don't think
that is the Right Way to do it. Also, it seems that those packages
will be "stuck" at coming from sid even when they enter woody.
Enlightenment is welcomed :-)
TIA
-D
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