Apt preferences: How to avoid a specific version of a package?
How can I keep apt-get from trying specific versions of some
packages when doing a dist-upgrade?
I have unstable as default in apt.conf, so that gets priority
990. Then I have assigned priority 995 to experimental in
preferences so that apt-get will upgrade to the latest and
greatest (-pain-in-the-behind, sometimes :o) versions
available there. However, some packages from experimental
don't work correctly (as can be expected of course). I can
downgrade to the unstable version manually, that is not the
problem, but how do I keep apt-get from upgrading it again
to that same version at the next run?
For example, the 2.3.2.ds1-1 version of libc6 from experimental
makes lots of programs crash, so I don't want that particular
version installed. However, I do want to keep tracking unstable
and experimental when a newer version is uploaded. So I can't
just pin libc6 to version 2.3.2-8 or release a=unstable.
I tried to do this by adding lines such as these to preferences:
|Package: packagename
|Pin: version bad-version-number
|Pin-Priority: -10
because the apt_preferences man page says this will prevent that
version from being installed. This does not work. apt-get keeps
trying to install the bad version.
Is there another way I'm overlooking?
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