Difference between "woody" and "stable" in apt Default-Release?

[Uwe Storbeck <uwe@ibr.ch>]

Hi,

I've just seen a somewhat irritating behaviour of apt-get
update/upgrade. Formerly I thought "woody" and "stable" are synonyms
for now because Woody is the current stable distribution.

I've set Default-Release to "stable" in apt.conf:

APT {
  Get {
    Fix-Broken "true";
    Show-Upgraded "true";
    Purge "true";
  };
  Default-Release "stable";
};

If I add woody-proposed-updates to my sources.list and do an upgrade
with apt-get update/upgrade the packages from proposed-updates won't
get installed:

deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian woody-proposed-updates main contrib non-free

# apt-get upgrade
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0  not upgraded.

# apt-show-versions -a -p logcheck
logcheck        1.1.1-13.1      install ok installed
logcheck        1.1.1-13.1      stable
logcheck        1.1.1-13.5.woody.0      proposed-updates
logcheck/stable uptodate 1.1.1-13.1

If I change Default-Release to "woody" proposed-updates get installed
as expected.

So if I want proposed-updates I have to set Default-Release to "woody"
instead of "stable". Not just understandable, but as far as good.

If I additionally want to mix stable and testing releases and use apt
pinning things will be somewhat more complicated and don't work as
expected anymore.

My preferences:

Package: *
Pin: release a=woody-proposed-updates,o=Debian,l=Debian
Pin-Priority: 999
Package: *
Pin: release a=stable,o=Debian,l=Debian
Pin-Priority: 900
Package: *
Pin: release a=sarge-proposed-updates,o=Debian,l=Debian
Pin-Priority: 777
Package: *
Pin: release a=testing,o=Debian,l=Debian
Pin-Priority: 700

If I set Default-Release to "stable" pinning works as expected, packages
will be installed from Woody by default. But as already written packages
from proposed-updates will not be installed on upgrades.
If I change Default-Release to "woody" to get the proposed-updates apt
tries to upgrade all my packages to testing on an apt-get upgrade run.
I've tried some variations in the preferences file with "woody" and
"sarge" instead of "stable" and "testing" but nothing works.

What am I doing wrong?

I want my system mostly be pinned to stable with proposed-updates
installed. Additionally I want to use a few packages from testing.

Regards

Uwe