Re: apt_preferences
On Tue, Feb 26, 2002 at 11:15:01AM -0800, "Karl M. Hegbloom" <karlheg@microsharp.com> was heard to say:
> I think that "aptitude" does not handle "/etc/apt/preferences" (man
> apt_preferences) correctly, and I have a question about what "apt-get
> dist-upgrade" is supposed to do.
aptitude does not override the choices made by apt. Nothing special
is done to support it either -- apt's core logic should handle all of
this. It works for me: for instance, I have experimental in
/etc/apt/sources.list, pinned at a non-default level, and aptitude does
not attempt to upgrade dhcp-client to the experimental version.
There is one bit of ugliness, which shouldn't affect you:
When you select a particular package version manually, the information
about what you selected is not stored anywhere -- not in aptitude's
persistent state information, not in apt_preferences.
The reason is simple: there's nothing sensible to do. There's no way
to know whether the user wanted to install just that version, or enable
upgrades from the archive it's from; if that version is available from
multiple archives,
I didn't want to munge apt_preferences because that seemed bad and
complicated; storing version information in aptitude's state directory
would also be bad (since it would in fact override apt_preferences) -- in
fact, the code to do this is there, but it's only used to communicate
with a subprocess when using the transparent-su-to-root hack.
> First of all, does "aptitude" support the "apt_preferences" mechanism
> described in the "apt_preferences" man page? If not, it should! I'm
> having a hard time telling if it has done the right thing or not --
> there is no indicator as to what release each package is to be
> downloaded from until it actually prints the URI while pulling them
> in. IIRC, it pulled several or all of the updates from "unstable"
> when it should have pulled them from "testing" (see below for
> config).
I'd have to work to not support apt_preferences. There's a wishlist
bug about providing a column format for the release that a package is
in; however, no-one has yet stepped forward to suggest a solution to the
issue of "what do I do when there are multiple available releases?"
Probably I should put some of that in the detailed information screen,
though.
Daniel
--
/-------------------- Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org> -------------------\
| "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect." |
| -- "The Princess Bride" |
\------------- Got APT? -- Debian GNU/Linux http://www.debian.org ------------/
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