Ubuntu Wiki

Selective Backport Support

Problem is that backports at the moment are fairly all or nothing unless you are extremely good at APT internals and using pins. The pinning interface would work extremely well for backports if there was a sane and easy way to access pinned packages

Use Cases

• - Alice wants an updated version of codeblocks, but doesn't want to have to read manpages to pull only that package

Pinning

• - Already exists, but no good GUI interface - Synaptic should be extended to have a multiple versions section added to it. - libapt needs an interface to edit pins file sanely, so that when a backport is installed, it will be auto-updated, so things like security fixes can be pushed via the backports repo.

Pinning dependencies

• - Dependencies are only pulled in by depends line, even if the parent package is pinned, deps will not be updated unless parent package has an updated Depends line which explicately pulls in the new version - Dependences MUST be pinned along with their source package; apt will have to be able to determine this case and pin (talk to mvo)

Places needing work

• - apt may need pinning API to write pins - synaptic needs to use said API to use pins, and show backports in a seperate section - same for adept