Brian Servis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> Probably the best way is to use the 'hold' feature of dselect. Get
> your system set up as you want with stable then use dselect to put the
> packages you want to keep the same on 'hold' with the '=' key. Then
> modify your /etc/apt/sources.list to include the unstable branch.
> Then
> only update packages using dselect select method. I'm not sure what
> happens if a package you want to upgrade depends on a later version of
> a package you have on hold.
I have found that if a package is on 'hold' then it will not be upgraded
by art either. A member of this list sent me a small script which will
put a package on hold without needing to start dselect (which I avoid
like the plague). I found this useful when the latest version of Exim
wouldn't work on my system. I held it back for a while and was able to
regularly upgrade Potato on my machine without fear of losing the mail
facility. As soon as I worked out what the problem was I manually
upgraded the package and it was then not held back.
---- start
#! /bin/bash
# dpkg-hold -- command line tool to flag package(s) as held.
#
# by Craig Sanders, 1998-10-26. This script is hereby placed into the
# public domain.
#
# BUGS: this script has absolutely no error checking. this is not good.
if [ -z "$*" ] ; then
echo "Usage:"
echo " dpkg-hold <package...>"
exit 1
fi
for i in $@ ; do
echo "$i hold"
done | dpkg --set-selections
---- end
AFAIK apt will not attempt to upgrade packages dependent on the package
held back. Perhaps someone else can verify this?
--
Phillip Deackes
Debian Linux (Potato)
