Re: Mixing Debian releases the easy way - HowTo - questions

[Chris Halls <chris.halls@nikocity.de>]

I delayed my daily 'fix' of new packages :) to experiment a little with
pinning, Default-Release, apt-get upgrade and apt-show-versions.

I'm posting my interpretation of the findings - please speak up if you know
better!

In summary, it seems that using pinning and Default-Release gives you
different behaviour for apt-get upgrade [*]:

- If you pin to testing (using lines in /etc/apt/preferences), 
  'apt-get upgrade' will only upgrade those packages which are newer in
  testing.  If you have installed something manually from unstable, that
  version will stay the same on your system until a newer version has
  propogated into testing.

- If you select APT::Default-Release "testing"; in /etc/apt/apt.conf,
  'apt-get upgrade' will also upgrade unstable versions of packages.  Newly
  selected packages will be installed from testing (if they are available).
  Question:  If a package that was being tracked in unstable makes it into
  testing, does it now get tracked in testing?

On Mon, Feb 11, 2002 at 07:11:31PM -0800, tluxt wrote:
> I am particularly concerned about ensuring apt-get upgrade works properly,
> and simply - ie,
>   not having extra-normal things to do for the person doing the upgrade.

My systems have used the pinning method up until now, with me manually
upgrading unstable versions.  I'll switch to APT::Default-Release and see
how it behaves.

>     [Note: On my several months old Woody install,
>     in /etc/apt I have no file called apt.conf .
>     I do have there a directory apt.conf.d that has one file in it:
>       70debconf
>     In this case, what I exactly need to do is create the file
>     /etc/apt/apt.conf, and put in it only the following line, correct?
>       APT::Default-Release "testing";]

Yes, that's right.

> =======================================
> From: Christoph Martin <martin@uni-mainz.de>
> Subject: apt-show-versions
> 
> apt-show-versions is a script which eases maintenance of mixed
> stable/testing or testing/unstable systems. While beeing able to
> update the packages from your *main* distribution with apt-get upgrade
> it is quite difficult to do the same for the *not-main*
> packages. While you can use the pinning feature of apt if these are
> only a few it is quite annoying to put all the package names in
> apt/preferences which should be pinned. Like in one of my installation
> where I have 247 packages from stable and 229 from testing.
[...]
> 
>   apt-get install `apt-show-versions -u -b | fgrep unstable`
> 
> to upgrade all unstable packages to their newest versions.

Christoph, have you tried APT::Default-Release?  Does that not do this job
automatically?  (I'm not saying apt-show-versions is not useful; I'm just
curious, and apt-show-versions does far more than just the job of tracking
both testing and unstable versions).

HTH,

Chris

-----------------
[*] If you're interested in how I got this result:

I used my workstation which has a mixture of testing and unstable packages
installed.  I ran apt-get update, and for each of the senarios I ran:
 
# apt-get -s upgrade


1. With pinning in /etc/apt/preferences:

11 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0  not upgraded.

- The packages to be upgraded were all in testing.  The unstable packages I
  had installed were to be left alone.

2. With no pinning, APT::Default-Release set to testing:

45 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 3  not upgraded.

- All of the testing packages were listed again, plus other packages where I
  had installed an unstable version and there was a new version available in
  unstable.

3. With no pinning, APT::Default-Release set to unstable or not present at
all:

116 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 3  not upgraded.

- This time all packages would have been upgraded to their latest unstable
  version, regardless of whether I had the testing or unstable version
  installed.

-- 
Chris Halls | Frankfurt, Germany