Re: Weired package policy

[Joe Pfeiffer <pfeiffer@cs.nmsu.edu>]

Hans <hans.ullrich@loop.de> writes:
<snip>
> I searched the manuals for this point, but this was nowhere mentioned. Of 
> course, you may say, that this is self-evident, but people might want to have 
> the repo small and may think, "hey, if I get testing, then all packages of 
> stable will be available as well."

As I understand the repository structure, packages in stable are not
necessarily also in testing.  Stable is, as the name implies, packages
that are regarded as good and solid; testing is packages that are
candidates to be upgrades to those in stable.

So, unless you are really running a machine strictly for the purpose of
testing packages, you should have your apt preferences set so that
you'll find packages in stable as that's the standard set of packages,
plus packages in testing so you can stay more current.  In my case, part
of my /etc/apt/preferences is

Package: *
Pin: release a=testing
Pin-Priority: 700

Package: *
Pin: release a=stable
Pin-Priority: 650

in order to capture this intent.