JoeS

I'm not familiar with how Debian works. I have a few
questions about repositories:

What are volatile updates; who would need these?
Would they update packages installed from stable or some other
repo when I do updates?

I have a few repositories in sources.list:
Main, Backports, Multimedia, Wine
would I need to specify which repository to install a package from?
Would there be a default repo that aptitude installs from?

How do I navigate the various repositories with aptitude?

Thanks

chris81

So debian-volatile will only contain changes to stable programs that are necessary to keep them functional.

(from Debian -- The debian-volatile Project if you want to read more about).



For the latest part of your question, I hope you'll find answer at
APT HOWTO

chris81

Daan

In general, aptitude installs the package with the highest version number if it finds several versions. I think this means that packages from Debian Multimedia get installed even though they are in Main too. But I think nothing from backports is installed unless you specify it to be so. Have a look at the Debian Backports webpage. I don't have the Wine repo, but I did have the others (and nothing else) and it worked just fine without special configuration.

__________________
OS's I use: Debian Lenny, Windows XP, Windows Vista

coopstah13

typically you don't tell it which repo to use, you just pick the package to install and it looks in the repos you have enabled to install it or not

JoeS

Thanks for the info. It was helpful.

I also wanted to know if I could search through
a particular repository using aptitude. I think
aptitude mixes them together, but I would like
to look at what is in the various repositories
separately.

Thanks