Jens, Thanks for the ideas. In fact, today, I did a Google search on ``/etc/apt/preferences" and got many of the same results. My German is not as good as my Scandinavian languages (I did post- graduate study in Sweden and later married a Norwegian-American whom I met while she was majoring in Scandinavian studies) so I read the articles in English, French and Danish before venturing into the German.
The other problem was that the Google results suggested that the apt_preferences system appears to have taken the developers some time to debug. There were a lot of ``unintended consequences" during the process. More recently, a number of user messages picked up by the Google search seem to have had trouble understanding the process. I am not surprised. I did too. The following appears to accomplish exactly what I am looking for -- namely to update packages downloaded from testing with testing updates and to update packages downloaded from unstable with unstable updates but not to transfer anything from testing to unstable without explicit user intervention. Package: * Pin: release a=testing Pin-Priority: 777 Package: * Pin: release a=unstable Pin-Priority: 333 Thanks again for the help. On 13 Oct 2001, at 21:34, Jens Benecke wrote: > > http://www.google.com/search?q=apt%20preferences%20testing%20unstable > > > Well, save yourself and ask Google. First hit. > Number four (Linux User FAQ) is actually from one of my web sites. ;)
