Package: apt
Version: 0.8.14.1
Severity: minor
Hi.
Either I have some misunderstanding here, or something is somwhere documented
wrong.
apt_preferences(5) says:
Sometimes the installed version of a package is more recent than the
version belonging to the target release, but not as recent as a version
belonging to some other distribution. Such a package will indeed be
upgraded when apt-get install some-package or apt-get upgrade is
executed, because at least one of the available versions has a higher
priority than the installed version.
Ok e.g. something like this:
Consider stable is the target relese. Package "foo" has the following versions
stable 1.00
testing 2.01
installed 2.00
(i.e. foo was installed manually from testing and then an updated was moved
into testing)
Now as I understand the above text, it should get upgraded, right?
But I'd calculate the priorities (as described a bit above in the manpage) as
following:
stable 1.00 => 990 (this version is not installed and blongs to the target
release)
testing 2.01 => 500 (not installed and belongs not to the target release)
installed 2.00 => 100 (installed)
So 1.00 has the highest prio, but according to the manpage, versions with prio
<1000 are
not downgraded. So I'd say nothing should happen.
So IMHO either, the cited example is wrong or misleading or it's somewhere
missing that:
If a version would lead to a downgrade AND that version's prio is not >=1000
THEN
it's like that version wouldn't exist at all, and the next highest prio version
is taken
(which is in this case the 2.01 with prio 500; then the example would be right).
If this is true, then I guess it should be added to that section of the manpage:
APT then applies the following rules, listed in order of precedence, to
determine which version of a package to install.
Cheers,
Chris.
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