Package: apt
Version: 1.8.2.3
Severity: minor
Dear Maintainers,
on my system (Debian 10 with some backports) I have pinned most packages
to Debian Buster with priority 1000 (in "/etc/apt/preferences"). This is
my attempt to handle unattended upgrades upgrading a package that had
the same version in stable and oldstable and then gets updated in stable
only. I want any such package to be automatically downgraded to
oldstable version even if it was accidentally updated to stable version
(i.e. I want automatic unattended upgrades to stick with my target
release as much as possible by default).
However I noticed that it is no longer possible to use one time package
download commands with different target release (e.g. to download
selected packages just for inspecting or extracting templates) such as:
apt-get --target-release stable download $(<SELECTED-PACKAGES.txt)
Perhaps the "-t, --target-release, --default-release" option could
create a pin at some higher priority than 990. If priority 990 is
required to avoid some unwanted side effects for that option maybe
another option like "--force-target-release" with pin at higher priority
could be useful in cases like this.
Regards,
Jmkr
