[Techtalk] Question about apt (sort of) conflict

Terry tech at futurecourse.com
Sun Mar 18 00:43:20 UTC 2012


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.

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?

(Just FYI - there are no unresolved dependencies and everything else
seems to be in fine working order and nothing that was installed from
dotdeb.org has a dependency on mysql-common, at least not that I have
been able to ascertain).

Thanks in advance for any enlightenment!

-- 
Terry


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