HELP (was Re: Some myths regarding apt pinning)

["Jeffrey L. Taylor" <jeff@austinblues.dyndns.org>]

I tried to install emacs-nox from unstable with aptitude.  Now it is
pulling all of unstable, a dozen packages at a time.  How do I revert
to stable?  And is there a way to just get emacs-nox from unstable (or
testing) with a minimum number of dependencies, leaving the bulk of
the packages at stable?

TIA,
  Jeffrey

Quoting Travis Crump <pretzalz@techhouse.org>:
> Pinning is roughly equivalent to 'apt-get install 
> randompackage/unstable'.  Neither will try to pull in unstable 
> dependencies, but will instead just fail if the package can't be 
> installed with testing dependencies. 'apt-get -t unstable install 
> randompackage' is probably the worst command to use since it will pull 
> unstable dependencies for uninstalled packages even for unversioned 
> dependencies.  Pinning has essentially been useless for the past 2 
> months, but for the 10 months before that I thought that pinning *was* 
> useful so it seems disingenuous to claim that it is always useless.
> 
>