On Tue, Feb 19, 2002 at 11:42:42PM -0800, Paul E Condon,,, wrote: | I recently dist-upgraded to Woody, using a script by Osamu Aoki. It took | many hours over ppp, | but it worked. Thanks, Osamu! | | And he is right in saying the install of Woody is too easy. Beyond | stumbling onto his post telling about his script very little was | required of me. But now a question: | | Part of the upgrade was, of course, upgrading apt-get and dpkg. The | script installed a file | /etc/apt/preferences which had not been there before and gave some brief | instructions about | something called "tracking". I'm guessing this new stuff has something | to do with keeping | track of stable, testing, and unstable all at once. What does this stuff | really do? How does it | work? Where do I look to find out?
Look at Osamu's web page. He explained it to me there. Basically here's how it works : you include all of potato, woody, and sid (or whatever subset may be interesting to you) in your sources.list file. This will give you a complete database of available packages. Then each package gets a priority based on several criteria. First, currently installed packages get a priority of 100. For not currently installed packages, the preferences file is consulted to see if a package is given a priority. My preferences file looks like this : Package: * Pin: release a=testing Pin-Priority: 900 Package: * Pin: release a=stable Pin-Priority: 500 Package: * Pin: release a=unstable Pin-Priority: 95 If the package in question is found in testing and its name matches "*", then it has a priority of 900. This is higher than a currently installed package, so if a new version is in testing it will get installed (via 'apt-get upgrade'). If a package is found in stable it has a priority of 500. If the version is newer, then it will be installed. However, unstable has a priority of 95. This is less than that of an installed package. Thus a package in sid will never be preferred over an installed package regardless of version. If it doesn't exist anywhere else, then it will have priority. With this setup, I am "tracking" woody (and potato, but not really). When woody changes, my system will change to "track" that. -D -- In the way of righteousness there is life; along that path is immortality. Proverbs 12:28