apt-pinning
 

if anyone is interested, i found this and thought i'll post here - http://jaqque.sbih.org/kplug/apt-pinning.html

might be helpful to people.

Thanks h/w. I often end up pinning and always go on a hunt for the docs/how-tos. One thing I learned is NOT to have a blank line at the top of /etc/apt/preferences...

Great link ! Thanks for the tip!
By the way, i have a doubt about the sources.list functioning ...
Suppose i have a sources.list like this (note that stable is pointing to a brazilian mirror) and the same preferences from the article:

#Stable
deb http://ftp.br.debian.org/debian stable main non-free contrib
deb http://non-us.br.debian.org/debian-non-US stable/non-US main contrib non-free

#Testing
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian testing main non-free contrib
deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US testing/non-US main contrib non-free

#Unstable
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian unstable main non-free contrib
deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US unstable/non-US main contrib non-free

He sad that if a package can be picked from stable it will be, otherwise it will pick from testing or after it, by unstable right ?
But if the package is present in stable but at the moment the server is down ?
It will try to pick from the others (testing and unstable) ?
I'm asking this because if the package is present in stable but server is down, my desire will by not to pick from the others. Maybe i could try another time...

Do i made myself clear ?
:scratch:

It won't try another server if the brazillian mirror is down, unless that server has the same (stable) package. If a server is down when you do an apt-get update, it will complain of missing indexes. Once it has the indexes it knows which files (and which versions of the files) to get. So if the preferences leave it getting stable files it will only attempt to get those files (it may try more than one server for the stable files though).

Great ! That´s exactly what i want ! :)
Thanks for the enlightenment.
Have you learned this but experience or with some documentation ?
I dind´t find yet, a documentation with this kind of details. :study:

http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/ap...pt-get.en.html (look at 3.10 here)

and, surrpise surprise - man 5 apt_preferences

i haven't yet tried apt-pinning. but will sometime soon (when i do a full re-install of my system.)

hey llamakc - what happens with the blank line? (one would think a system like apt doesn't/shouldn't get affected with such things, huh? ) :D
thanks for your tip too. :)