Debian Weekly News - E-Mail
From: Grant Bowman <grantbow@svpal.org> Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2001 12:44:29 -0800 To: dwn@debian.org Subject: Pinning Unstable: Woody use of Evolution For all those that are using Woody but would like to sometimes run a few packages from Sid, this fix works like a charm. I couldn't find the specifics documented anywhere, but I felt others would like to know about it. /etc/apt/preferences Package: * Pin: release a=unstable Pin-Priority: 50 /etc/apt/sources.list deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free What will these lines do? Pinning the priority of unstable to 50 makes it so that these packages are never automatically selected for upgrade. The sources.list line is needed so that packages that are not in woody are installed with `apt-get evolution` (for example). Dependencies are handled correctly and the system remains on Woody packages with the exceptions of the explicitly loaded ones. Happy Holidays, -- -- Grant Bowman <grantbow@svpal.org>
From: Christoph Martin <martin@uni-mainz.de> Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2001 15:41:17 +0100 (MET) To: dwn@debian.org Subject: apt-show-versions apt-show-versions is a script which eases maintenance of mixed stable/testing or testing/unstable systems. While being able to update the packages from your *main* distribution with apt-get upgrade it is quite difficult to do the same for the *not-main* packages. While you can use the pinning feature of apt if these are only a few it is quite annoying to put all the package names in apt/preferences which should be pinned. Like in one of my installation where I have 247 packages from stable and 229 from testing. Try apt-show-versions | fgrep /testing | wc to see how many packages you have from testing or apt-show-versions -u to see a list of packages which are upgradeable either to stable or testing or unstable or apt-get install `apt-show-versions -u -b | fgrep unstable` to upgrade all unstable packages to their newest versions. Christoph
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This issue of Debian Weekly News was edited by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier and Martin 'Joey' Schulze.