Re: Further apt_preferences man page fixes
On Sun, 2003-02-09 at 10:32, Thomas Hood wrote:
> More serious is the issue of priority assignment to "instance"
> versus "version". It appears that I was fairly successful in
> expressing my belief about how APT works, but less successful
> in expressing an accurate belief. Based on what I read in
> #179868, I take it that APT assigns priorities to versions,
> not to instances; it does not keep track of instances until
> it needs to find an instance of a selected version to download
> for installation. Is this right?
Well, I have looked into this, and it does appear that I was
wrong. I conducted an experiment with the following sources.list.
deb http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian woody main
deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian woody main
In preferences I assign priority 900 to the UK site and 800 to
the NL site. apt-cache policy output looks like this:
$ apt-cache policy
Package Files:
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
release a=now
900 http://ftp.uk.debian.org woody/main Packages
release v=3.0r1a,o=Debian,a=stable,l=Debian,c=main
origin ftp.uk.debian.org
800 http://ftp.nl.debian.org woody/main Packages
release v=3.0r1a,o=Debian,a=stable,l=Debian,c=main
origin ftp.nl.debian.org
Pinned Packages:
If priority is assigned to instances then apt-get should get
the package from the UK site because instances from there
have higher priority. If priority is assigned to versions
then apt-get should get the package from the NL site because
that is listed first in sources.list.
In fact apt-get gets the package from the NL site. So it
does appear that priorities are assigned to versions, not
to instances.
The apt_preferences man page needs to be corrected. I'll
work on it. Please send other patches and comments to me
and I'll roll them into a new patch.
--
Thomas Hood <jdthood@yahoo.co.uk>
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