Marty wrote:
I would say my Debian version is sarge because all the packages on my system come from sarge (besides one, Octave, which is from unstable). I seemed to missing something here. Are there files on your system(besides user created) which aren't included in any package and therefore don't have a package version? My understanding is that all the files on the system are from packages (unless you installed packages yourself) and therefore they all have a package version. So if your sources.list points to stable and stable only, then all your packages are from stable, and your Debian version is stable. I guess you could define this differently, like what release a specific package comes from.Colin Ingram wrote:Apt uses its default behavior if you don't have an apt.conf file. As for version this default behavior is to update to the newest version available.It seems like you are referring to package version. I was referring to Debian version, e.g. sarge, etch, stable, 3.1a0, etc.
This seems to be the case. Apt only cares about whats in the package list, which is controlled by source.list. If there is more than one version of a package in that list apt installs the most recent one by default. Apt.conf and preferences override this behavior as outlined in man_preferences(see man apt_preferences) So if you don't have an apt.conffile and you don't have a preferences file and you have multiple versions specified in your sources.list then you will install/upgrade from/to sid. (or the most recent version specified in sources.list) On the other hand if you only specify one release in your sources.list file (i.e. stable) then apt will install/upgrade from/to stable because those will be the newest (and only) packages it knows about.So what you are saying is consistent with the others -- apt does not "know"or "care about" the "Debian version." I knew this to be true with dpkg, but not apt.
Yup, I was referring to package version but as a said above I see that as being equivalent to Debian versionIn a nut shell you can control your "version" with the apt.conf/preferences files or by only downloading a package list from a single release.Once again it seems you are referring to package version here, unless I'm missing something.