Re: Aptitude Error

[Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org>]

On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 12:54:57PM -0500, "Boyd Stephen Smith Jr." <bss@iguanasuicide.net> was heard to say:
> My instinct is that '-t $something' effectively increases the priority of all 
> packages from the $something repository, which may make the dependency 
> resolver pull more from that repository than is absolutely necessary.

  If you pass "-t ARCHIVE", that means that versions from ARCHIVE are
treated as the default package version.  It also increases the pin
priority to 990.  aptitude's resolver tries particularly hard to install
the default package version, and it will tie-break using the priority
(you can configure both those behaviors extensively, but those are the
defaults).  The story is more extreme with the apt resolver: it won't
even consider anything but the default version of a package.

  See also apt_preferences(5), section "APT's default priority
assignments"; "-t" is the same as setting Default-Release.

  Daniel