cheatsheet.zwischenspeicher.info

Some tech documentation and snippets, finally organized.
Posts tagged as dpkg

APT: Prevent upgrading of particular packages

There are cases in which it is desirable to keep a certain package version, be it a forced downgrade or a custom build. Here I show several ways to achieve this.

The most simple possibility is to mark the package hold in the dpkg status file /var/lib/dpkg/status:

$ echo "PACKAGE_NAME hold" | dpkg set-selections

or, using apt-mark as wrapper:

$ apt-mark hold PACKAGE_NAME

To undo this and return the selected package to apt's default workflow, run

$ echo "PACKAGE_NAME installed" | dpkg set-selections

or, respectively:

$ apt-mark unhold PACKAGE_NAME

This is a very static solution and apt provides a much more flexible way of package handling, called pinning. It is configured in the file /etc/apt/preferences resp. in an arbitrary file in the /etc/apt/preferences.d/ directory.

Pinnig allows prioritization of package versions depending on factors like version number, repository or release name - wildcards and regular expressions are allowed. The most simple configuration for a single package, analog to the dpkg way described above, would look like this:

### File: /etc/apt/preferences 
###       OR
###       /etc/apt/preferences.d/SOMEFILE

Package:        PACKAGE_NAME
Pin:            version PACKAGE_VERSION
Pin-Priority:   1001

See the manpage apt_preferences(5) for a detailed description of all pinning possibilities.

Finally, for local builds it is possible to assign them a local version number, as I have described in this post, and pin, if necessary, based on that.