Okay, I rarely post topics here, but I think this one fits into a newbie section. :-/

Here's the deal. I'm running a stable version of Debian 6, and I would like to install a package from the unstable (sid) repo. Now most tutorials on google suggest that I should edit my /etc/apt/preferences and /etc/apt/apt.conf files to add a few lines. I have checked the /etc/apt folder and the two mentioned files do not exist. But two directories with similar names do: /etc/apt/preferences.d/ and /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/

This confuses me. Should I simply create the "preferences" and "apt.conf" files like the tutorials suggest or is this some form of different apt configuration where appropriate files have to be put inside these folders (like apache2 which uses sites-enabled and sites-available instead of one large httpd.conf file)?

Regards

Anything that the tutorial says to put in /etc/apt/preferences can be put in a file in /etc/apt/preferences.d/ directory and the same with /etc/apt/conf.d

And I take it that it is irrelevant what the file name is as long as it resides in one of those two directories, yes?

correct

Reminds me of my debian squeeze.

I create file <any-name>.list containing
in /etc/apt/sources.list.d when I create Packages.gz file ( in /root/<folder> ) locally using 'dpkg-scanpackages' .

So I don't touch /etc/apt/sources.list
Then 'apt-get update' adds my local packages in 'apt-cache' list.

Take a look at:
AptPreferences - Debian Wiki - http://wiki.debian.org/AptPreferences
Apt-Pinning for Beginners - http://jaqque.sbih.org/kplug/apt-pinning.html
Chapter*2.*Debian package management - http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/de...didate_version

All of the info you need is in the Debian docs and/or the wiki.