[Techtalk] Question about apt (sort of) conflict

[Wim De Smet]

Hey,

On Sun, Mar 18, 2012 at 1:43 AM, Terry <tech at futurecourse.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Moved from CentOS to Debian a couple of months ago so am learning about
> apt.  Is there a way to tell apt to ignore a particular package in a
> particular repository?  I did this with yum in CentOS but many Google
> searches later, I can't figure out how to do it with apt.  I've looked
> at pinning but the docs are confusing and as best I can tell, that only
> lets you hold a specific version of a package.

I had some trouble finding it, so not sure if you were looking at the
right manpage. Pinning is explained in apt_preferences(5).

> The issue is this: I added the MariaDB repo to my sources.list and
> installed.  A new version was released and I updated.  All fine so far.
>  I later needed to install some packages from dotdeb.org's repo, so I
> added that to my sources.list and installed what I needed.
> Again, everything fine.
>
> When MariaDB put out its latest stable release, apt held back
> mysql-common.  I finally figured out why - the installed package is from
> MariaDB.  Dotdeb.org says it has the latest update instead of the
> package from MariaDB.  Once I figured out why it was being held back, I
> commented out the dotdeb.org entry in my sources list, upgraded
> mysql-common and then re-enabled the dotdeb.org entry. However, apt
> still shows that mysql-common is being held back when I do an apt-get
> dist-upgrade.  I thought apt handled that kind of thing for you - if I
> install xyz from this repo then apt will look for xyz in that repo.
>
> What I'd ideally like is to have the dotdeb.org repo ignore
> mysql-common.  Or is this a matter of me just commenting out dotdeb when
> I need to upgrade mysql-common?

Not sure if this will fix the problem, but you can pin on origin.
Something like this (in an appropiate file in
/etc/apt/preferences.d/):

Package: mysql*
Pin: origin "dotdeb.org"
Pin-Priority: 1

You might have to fiddle with the hostname (copy it over from your
sources.list), but the key thing is using the "origin" keyword.

HTH,
Wim