6.30 Pinning Distributions

With the Debian packaging system you can specify that your packages come by default from one distribution but you can override this with packages from other distributions. The concept is called pinning and after it is set up you can have, for example, testing as your default release and then include unstable in /etc/apt/sources.list and install cdrecord from unstable with:

  # apt-get install cdrecord/unstable

The following /etc/apt/preferences makes apt-get use testing unless it is overridden, even though there are entries for unstable in /etc/apt/sources.list:

  Package: *
  Pin: release a=testing
  Pin-Priority: 900

  Package: *
  Pin: release o=Debian
  Pin-Priority: -10

---

Your donation will support ongoing availability and give you access to the PDF version of this book. Desktop Survival Guides include Data Science, GNU/Linux, and MLHub. Books available on Amazon include Data Mining with Rattle and Essentials of Data Science. Popular open source software includes rattle, wajig, and mlhub. Hosted by Togaware, a pioneer of free and open source software since 1984. Copyright © 1995-2022 Graham.Williams@togaware.com Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0