Apt-Pinning for Beginners

I'm off work this week and it's given me an opportunity to rebuild one of my servers. I decided to move from FreeBSD to Debian because I like the speed of grabbing binaries from apt vs. compiling ports. Also, there is much more Common Lisp support with Debian.

As part of the install, I wanted to grab some packages from Debian Unstable (namely Gallery 2). I'd done this on another server and didn't care what got upgraded to an instable status. However, I decided on the server I just rebuilt that I wanted to stay as stable as possible while getting the packages in Unstable. I found an article called Apt-Pinning for Beginners that gives you a simple way to control how apt chooses to get its packages. I followed the instructions and I think it's working.

Nifty! Those apt guys sure are cool.