Re: trouble getting apt-pinning to work

[Brendan Miller <catphive@catphive.net>]

Ok, after spending some more time with the manpages, I figured out my
own problem:

Pin: release a=wheezy

Should have been:
Pin: release n=wheezy

Apparently it makes a distinction between the code name, and release
type like "stable" or "testing."

On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 4:15 PM, Brendan Miller <catphive@catphive.net> wrote:
> Further troubleshooting info:
>
> I ran apt-get policy and it appears my preferences aren't getting
> picked up. Does anyone know why this might happen, or what can be done
> to force the preferences file to reload?
>
> apt-cache policy
> Package files:
>  100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
>      release a=now
>  500 http://ftp-mirror.internap.com/pub/debian/ wheezy/contrib amd64 Packages
>      release o=Debian,a=testing,n=wheezy,l=Debian,c=contrib
>      origin ftp-mirror.internap.com
>  500 http://ftp-mirror.internap.com/pub/debian/ wheezy/main amd64 Packages
>      release o=Debian,a=testing,n=wheezy,l=Debian,c=main
>      origin ftp-mirror.internap.com
>  500 http://ftp-mirror.internap.com/pub/debian/ squeeze/contrib amd64 Packages
>      release v=6.0.6,o=Debian,a=stable,n=squeeze,l=Debian,c=contrib
>      origin ftp-mirror.internap.com
>  500 http://ftp-mirror.internap.com/pub/debian/ squeeze/main amd64 Packages
>      release v=6.0.6,o=Debian,a=stable,n=squeeze,l=Debian,c=main
>      origin ftp-mirror.internap.com
> Pinned packages:
>
>
> On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 4:07 PM, Brendan Miller <catphive@catphive.net> wrote:
>> I'm on debian stable (squeeze), but would like to be able to install a
>> few packages from testing (wheezy). I tried to set up apt pinning, but
>> it doesn't seem to work quite right. When I apt-get install something
>> now, it all comes from wheezy even if there are squeeze versions of
>> the package. It's almost like the preferences file isn't getting read.
>>
>> Is there anything wrong with the configuration below? Is there any way
>> to get apt to spit out it's internal model of the priorities so I can
>> verify that everything is actually getting loaded?
>>
>> /etc/apt/preferences:
>>
>> Package: *
>> Pin: release a=squeeze
>> Pin-Priority: 700
>>
>> Package: *
>> Pin: release a=wheezy
>> Pin-Priority: 650
>>
>> /etc/apt/sources.list:
>>
>> # Debian packages for squeeze
>> deb http://ftp-mirror.internap.com/pub/debian/ squeeze main contrib
>>
>> # Wheezy
>> deb http://ftp-mirror.internap.com/pub/debian/ wheezy main contrib