unison: Can the Sarge version be used with Sid (Kanotix)?

[Peter Knaggs]

On 7/7/05, Charles Fry <bad@frogcircus.org> wrote:
> > "hold back" a package 

> You can do exactly that with apt preferences. 

Wow, thanks!

I hadn't understood what apt preferences was
meant to be used for, until now :)

The following is just a writeup of what worked
for me, by following your advice:

So what I ended up doing for "pinning" unison 
on stable was to add stable to the end of
/etc/apt/sources.list so that it's selected last
(I ran "apt-get update" after adding it), like this:

deb http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian/ stable main

Then I added the "pin" selections 
to the /etc/apt/preferences file, like this:

Package: unison
Pin: release a=stable
Pin-Priority: 990

Package: unison-gtk
Pin: release a=stable
Pin-Priority: 990

The reason I chose 990 as the Pin-Priority is that 
on Kanotix, /etc/apt/apt.conf already has unstable
set as the default distribution like this:
APT::Default-Release "unstable";

So according to "man apt_preferences", because
the priority of 990 is already assigned to the
versions that are not installed and belong to 
the target release, I had to use at least 990
for the unison apt preference to be seen.

Then I did "apt-get remove unison"
(which removes unison-gtk also),
followed by "apt-get install unison-gtk"
(which installs unison also), and now
unison is back at version 2.9.1-2sarge2,
and again works fine with unison from Sarge.

The Pin-Priority used in /etc/apt/preferences
for selecting unison also needed to be at 
least 990 for unison to be pinned on stable when 
"apt-get dist-upgrade" was run.

Cheers,
Peter.