Re: Aptitude Error
On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 08:58:19PM -0700, Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org> was heard to say:
> 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.
That's not quite right.
The default version is the highest-priority available version. It
just happens that setting the pin priority to 990 *normally* has the
effect of changing the default version, but you could theoretically
manually pin another version to be higher.
The second effect of Default-Release is to change how certain
aptitude / apt-get commands choose the target version. This includes
"apt-get source", "apt-get build-dep", "aptitude build-dep", "aptitude
changelog", "aptitude download", and "aptitude show". In aptitude,
it causes arguments with no archive or version specifier to be treated
as if "/default-release" had been included. Unfortunately, it's
dreadfully underdocumented and underspecified.
Daniel
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