Re: [gNewSense-users] Making APT warn me about Debian Backports packages.

[Sam Geeraerts]

Op Tue, 21 Jan 2014 04:44:13 -0200
schreef Guilherme Vieira <address@hidden>:

> I've added Squeeze-Backports to my sources.list but I want APT to
> avoid installing packages from it unless I tell it to explicitly.

Two things to look out for:

 - squeeze-backports probably contains packages that do not meet
   gNewSense's software freedom criteria;
 - installing backports can get hairy pretty quickly because of
   dependencies.

> I think that's how it works on Debian systems, you have to use
> apt-get -t squeeze-backports .
> 
> I see on man pages this has something to do
> with /etc/apt/preferences.d, but that directory is empty on my system.

You can either create a file in /etc/apt/preferences.d/ or
edit /etc/apt/preferences. Our wiki page about packaging [1] has a
short example of how to configure apt pinning. You can learn about
priorities from the apt_preferences manpage. You can see the result of
your configuration with "apt-cache policy".

[1] http://www.gnewsense.org/Packaging?highlight=%28pinning%29