Re: Difficulty downgrading a mistakenly installed non-stable package

[Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk>]

On Fri 24 Apr 2015 at 12:37:36 -0400, Kynn Jones wrote:

> I try to keep my system as close to 100% stable as possible.  In spite
> of this, a version of libp11-kit0 that is ahead of stable "somehow"
> snuck into my system:
> 
>     $ apt-cache policy libp11-kit0
>     libp11-kit0:
>       Installed: 0.20.7-1~bpo70+1
>       Candidate: 0.20.7-1~bpo70+1
>       Version table:
>      *** 0.20.7-1~bpo70+1 0
>             100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
>          0.12-3 0
>             500 http://debian.csail.mit.edu/debian/ stable/main amd64 Packages
>             500 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ stable/main amd64 Packages

libp11-kit0 wasn't installed by mistake and didn't sneak onto your
system uninvited. Backports will pull in packages and versions of
packages which are not in a stable release.

Bug makes interesting reading; especially when it contains

  > In my opinion it's very good when backports is default in sources.list.

  My opinion is that I don't want to push ticking time bombs into the hands
  of our users. And that's exactly what defaulting to enabling backports
  was.