Mixing woody and sid. Strike, anybody?

[demian]

First off, Strike, I'm trying to find your aptitude NHF. Was it ever uploaded to the NHF section?

And now the problem: I installed a few packages from sid to my otherwise woody system using APT: :Default-Release "woody"; in my /etc/apt/apt.conf file and then apt-get -t sid install package. This worked pretty well but now I used dselect to update the available packages. Then I wanted to go through the package selection and it seems to ignore the fact that woody is to be the default release: When I hit 'install' it wants to upgrade 100+ packages which makes me think it's going to install all the sid packages that are of a higher version than the corresponding woody packages.

What I want, however, is to have only those packages from unstable that I explicitly asked for (including their dependencies). Is there any way to get this done with aptitude for instance?

[sarah31]

I would just like to say that dselect is a very difficult creature to figure out. I used it a few times and always ended out doing far more undesirable stuff to my system than I wanted.(ie lost defaults, lost desktop environments, etc) Console-apt, diety (which i think console-apt became this), and aptitude are better choice for do large select. apt-get is great for smaller upgrades.

[demian]

Bump.

As PMing doesn't work... Strike, can you give me the link to the NHF or mail it to me?

[Strike]

Nope, never added (or submitted for that matter) - http://www.dipaolo.f2s.com/Using-Aptitude.txt

As far using mainly Woody but some stuff from Sid, that process is known as pinning and was detailed in this issue of the Debian Weekly News (http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2002/1/). It points to this e-mail (http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2002/1/mail#1) with helpful hints.

[sarah31]

Hey strike! Thanks! I copied this info for later use.

[demian]

Hmmm, pinning also doesn't work. I guess what happened was that after I installed the sid packages when I did the apt-get update and used dselect's 'select' dialog it just marked all the newest available packages for upgrade regardless of which distribution they were from. So now my apt database has all those packages marked no matter what I do...

Anyway, it's only 17 packages from sid so far so the combined power of apt-show-versions and aptitude with the proper documentation should enable me to clean up the mess.

:D Debian :D

Cheers, demian

[Strike]

Hrm, I haven't tried pinning (since I use sid already), so I don't know about the possible pitfalls associated with it. I would suggest that once you do get things fixed (possibly just by reverting to all woody packages for now), that you give pinning a shot with a system that is known to be in working condition.

Of course, if you want to post other problems you have along the way I'll gladly take a look at what you have.

[knute]

I'm using sid myself (or whatever the unstable is pointing to at the moment) and haven't had any major problems.

A few minor ones, but that is to be expected with unstable regardless of what it is!

(Hrmmm... I won't draw the obvious parallels here either. ;) :D )