Strange handling of preferences

[devil]

This is not mainly a cry for help, because I am not sure there is n obvious fix for this. Of course some insight would be nice, if someone can offer it. I am out of clues.


Mainly I would like to document this strange behaviour I never seen or heard of before.


This is an install with siduction december, dist-upgraded on a daily schedule. The sources.list has unstable, testing and experimental, where the latter is pinned in /etc/apt/preferences:

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Package: *
Pin: release n=experimental
Pin-Priority: 1



A while ago I witnessed a dist-upgrade, where a lot of packages were pulled in from experimental. Checking apt-cache policy, I saw that experimental was obviously pinned with 500, ignoring the setting in preferences.


Next day things were all fine and dandy again. Same thing happened again last night. A control upgrade on the notebook with the same settings showed nothing unusual. This morning the workstation was back to normal again, upgrading from unstable.  No idea how that can happen.


greetz
devil

[michaa7]

I cannot explain, but there was another thread with more or less the same problem, packages from experimental without user interaction:
http://forum.siduction.org/index.php?topic=4918.msg40573#msg40573

I think it would be a good idea to investigate the affected packages.

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apt-show-versions | grep experimental

[GoinEasy9]

I don't know if this is any help, but, I also have experimental enabled in my sources list, and, my /etc/apt/preferences is empty, 0B. I do have the 10Siduction file in preferences.d, but, I only mention it because it's the only repo with a preference.  I always thought it was because apt got a lot smarter, and, automatically set the preferences, and, it has always worked.  I've used experimental in the past to get later versions of iceweasel and icedove, and, they are never updated from experimental, unless I specifically ask for apt to use experimental.

Currently, I'm using iceweasel from unstable, and, apt-cache shows the version available from experimental, but, doesn't add it to the updates.  It also automatically sets the preference to 1 for experimental.  That is, unless the preferences are set somewhere else in defaults.

$ apt-cache policy iceweasel
iceweasel:
  Installed: 31.1.0esr-1
  Candidate: 31.1.0esr-1
  Version table:
     32.0-1 0
          1 http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental/main amd64 Packages
*** 31.1.0esr-1 0
        500 http://http.debian.net/debian/ unstable/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

Could it be that apt wants an empty /etc/apt/preferences file?  Or, could it be that apt now wants custom preferences in /etc/apt/preferences.d?  Could it be that apt is smart enough not to update from experimental unless it's specifically asked to do so by using a custom pinning, and is misreading the pin at certain times?

I'm also using siduction from a fresh install of the december release, and, for me, leaving experimental enabled with no pinning has just worked.

[devil]

I have as of last night moved the preferences stanza to preferences.d/20experimental to see if this will occur again. The strange thing about this is that by next day, it automaticaly goes back to 1 from 500. I wil try to find someone in the depths of debian IRC who might shed some light on this unusual behaviour.


greetz
devil