Source: apt Version: 1.0.9.6 Severity: normal
Hi. I recently noted a "bug" in my own apt_preference configuration... what I do is roughly the following: I have a Debian installed as e.g. stable, but wish to take certain packages from other suites, so I enable these suites in sources.list, e.g. deb http://debian.mirror.lrz.de/debian/ stable main contrib non-free deb http://debian.mirror.lrz.de/debian/ stable-updates main contrib non-free deb http://debian.mirror.lrz.de/debian/ testing main contrib non-free deb http://debian.mirror.lrz.de/debian/ testing-updates main contrib non-free deb http://debian.mirror.lrz.de/debian/ testing-proposed-updates main contrib non-free deb http://debian.mirror.lrz.de/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free "disable" all packages from the non-stable suites via apt_preferences, e.g. via something like: Package: * Pin: release o=Debian,a=testing Pin-Priority: 1 and selectively enable those packages from other suites I want, e.g. via: Package: foobar Pin: release o=Debian,a=testing Pin-Priority: 500 Worked fine, till I've noted yesterday, that sudo was going to be upgraded, which I haven't pinned. So I looked it up and found that testing-updates and testing-proposed-updates use their own names as Suite: ... okay, my bad, I needed to add disabling rules for these as well, e.g. Package: * Pin: release o=Debian,a=testing-updates Pin-Priority: 1 and so on. Then I noticed that my pinning of single packages would of course suffer from the same problem, i.e. when I pin a=testing, and a newer version is in a=testing-* it wouldn't be taken. The same when I want to do something like "take package foo from testing|unstable, whichever is newer" (of course this doesn't make that much sense given how testing/unstable works, at least in Debian). So I tried for sudo something like: Package: sudo Pin: release o=Debian,a=testing,a=testing-updates,a=unstable Pin-Priority: 1 which seemed to work at first, but then I've noted that apparently apt takes simply only the last a=... IOW, multiple a=,a=,... is not like OR (which should be documented btw.) Simply revert the order, e.g. a=unstable,a=testing,... and you'll see that it will NOT take the highest version from all ORed suites. Next, and this is where IMHO the actual bug/deficiencie lies, I tried: Package: sudo Pin: release o=Debian,a=testing Pin-Priority: 1 Package: sudo Pin: release o=Debian,a=unstable Pin-Priority: 1 which showed, that this seems to work like a stop-after-first-match. IOW, it does the testing match, but doesn't pin unstable. If one disables testing from sources.list, it would even not find a pin at all (apt-cache policy telling: "Package pin: (not found)"). So in the end, the whole idea of selectively pinning a package for one specific suite works only for ONE suite. Which is apparently quite bad, given that testing/testing-updates/testing-proposed-updates are handled as different suites. The same when you add Debian Backports to the game... Cheers, Chris. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
