Question about Debian Unstable & Stable

[Daniel Armstrong]

On 5/27/06, bassix-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org <bassix-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> If I have debian unstable installed, could I set up my sources.list to
> ONLY check STABLE sources? Would this cause any problems? I'm
> wondering if this would be a way to ensure less possibility of updates
> "breaking" anything. Or are there dangers in doing this?

Something perhaps to consider in a similar vein... I am running a
hard-disk install of Kanotix (essentially debian-unstable) and after
running apt-get update, apt-get -u dist-upgrade today discovered that
arts sound was busted in KDE.

A quick look in the online forums revealed I wasn't alone with this
problem. The problem package was identified and the solution was to
simply roll back to a previous version, like so:

# cd /var/cache/apt/archives/
# dpkg -i libasound2_1.0.11-4_i386.deb

I also learned about "pinning" a package to a certain version if you
want to hold off for a bit on upgrades, by editing
/etc/apt/preferences:

Package: libasound2
Pin: version 1.0.11-4
Pin-Priority: 1001

Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 500

It worked, too. Fixing something that an upgrade rendered broken.
However, this was only one troublesome package - I imagine things
could get quite a bit messier if several packages were broken and many
dependencies were involved.
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