On Sun, 2003-02-09 at 10:32, Thomas Hood wrote: > More serious is the issue of priority assignment to "instance" > versus "version". It appears that I was fairly successful in > expressing my belief about how APT works, but less successful > in expressing an accurate belief. Based on what I read in > #179868, I take it that APT assigns priorities to versions, > not to instances; it does not keep track of instances until > it needs to find an instance of a selected version to download > for installation. Is this right?
Well, I have looked into this, and it does appear that I was wrong. I conducted an experiment with the following sources.list. deb http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian woody main deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian woody main In preferences I assign priority 900 to the UK site and 800 to the NL site. apt-cache policy output looks like this: $ apt-cache policy Package Files: 100 /var/lib/dpkg/status release a=now 900 http://ftp.uk.debian.org woody/main Packages release v=3.0r1a,o=Debian,a=stable,l=Debian,c=main origin ftp.uk.debian.org 800 http://ftp.nl.debian.org woody/main Packages release v=3.0r1a,o=Debian,a=stable,l=Debian,c=main origin ftp.nl.debian.org Pinned Packages: If priority is assigned to instances then apt-get should get the package from the UK site because instances from there have higher priority. If priority is assigned to versions then apt-get should get the package from the NL site because that is listed first in sources.list. In fact apt-get gets the package from the NL site. So it does appear that priorities are assigned to versions, not to instances. The apt_preferences man page needs to be corrected. I'll work on it. Please send other patches and comments to me and I'll roll them into a new patch. -- Thomas Hood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
