[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: Pinning question



Ryan Walters wrote:

[snip]


I'm still not sure why my setup doesn't work:

[snip]


I must be something extremely simple that I'm missing, anybody else???

Ryan,

You may think horrible things of me for giving this response instead of an answer to your question, but I stand behind Collin's opinion on pinning apt:

http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2003/debian-user-200304/msg04011.html
On Wed, 23 Apr 2003 00:16:11 +0100 Colin Watson wrote:
> ...
> I didn't realize you were interested in strange multi-release stuff. I
> don't trust pinning and avoid it like the plague. :)


(I thought he had said something even better about pinning more recently but I can't find it.)

Anyway, I've done pinning. Once. I pinned xserver-xfree86 in testing(Sarge) from stable(Woody). A new glibc later and having all my non-pinned development tools removed it wasn't long before I migrated to testing and then to unstable. To me the simple thing your missing (and as my experiance shows it's easy to miss) is that you're trying pinning at all.

Once again I think the Debian site could use some more newbie info. A good "Do you really want to use pinning? Check out apt-get.org for a backport of that package" message in section 3.10 of the APT HOWTO may be usefull. As would some disclaimers about how testing and unstable work for people reading the Releases secion (at least it's in section 3.8 of the APT HOWTO) or encouraging people to use aptitude or dselect instead of apt in section 3.2 extolling the merits of being presented with the option to choose from a list of suggested packages, but I digress. I keep putting off asking how to contribute to the web or what 'bug' package to submit suggestions or fixes to.

I guess you have some good reason for wanting packages out of oldstable (Potato) and know that the package(s) don't have (hardly) any dependancies but how will your pinning break when Potato is dropped from the mirrors? Are you trying to pin to a release name so that you don't have to change Sarge from testing to stable at some point? What package(s) are you trying to preserve? Maybe there is a better way of keeping them than pinning back to oldstable.

For whatever reason you're pinning, I hope it works out for the best. Sorry for the blabbing if you had already though the shortcommings of pinning over.

Jacob



Reply to: