Re: How automatic are backport package updates?
Michael Grant wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 12, 2021 at 10:35:05AM -0500, Dan Ritter wrote:
> > Are you running a production system?
>
> Yes, I guess you could call it production. It's my family & friends server. In all the time I have been running Debian Testing, I have never once suffered a serious or protracted disaster as you envision. Maybe I'm lucky! Little things, yes, like the systemd thing the other day. On very rare occasions, I have had to pin a package.
>
> > If so, you should be running buster, and considering moving to
> > the next stable release no sooner than a few weeks after the
> > transition to bullseye. You should accept security updates as
> > soon as is convenient for you, on an ongoing basis. Backports
> > are to solve specific issues.
>
> Is it then possible to add the /testing line to be able to occasionally pull in specific packages from testing? I think I would need a preferences.d/something.pref file.
>
> deb http://mirrors.linode.com/debian/ testing main contrib non-free
> deb-src http://mirrors.linode.com/debian/ testing main contrib non-free
>
> Clearly if the package I wanted to install from testing would suck in a lot of dependencies, then I likely would not do that, but I don't want it to suck things in from testing automatically otherwise, I am then running testing.
>
> Is this setup possible or am I really just going to have to be patient if something isn't in backports?
Yes. See
https://blog.randomstring.org/2016/08/17/debian-backports-pinning/
which gives examples for jessie and jessie-backports, but can
easily be translated into buster and testing, if that's what you
want.
With testing set to priority between 1 and 99, it will only
install packages if you explicitly ask for them, say
apt install -t testing packagename
The caution regarding dependencies that you have mentioned is spot-on.
-dsr-
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