Author: David Goodwin

Posted on

dotdeb – apt package pinning

As of last night, Debian Security released PHP 5.4.44 for Wheezy. Wheezy shipped with PHP 5.4.12 or something like that.

DotDeb is currently on 5.4.43, and if you’ve been using it based on the assumption that it has a newer version of a package over Debian, then an upgrade will leave your PHP install in a mess (e.g. no php5-gearman or php5-imagick).

To fix this, the following in e.g. /etc/apt/preferences.d/dotdeb will help :

Package: *
Pin: origin packages.dotdeb.org
Pin-Priority: 1001

This should make apt choose dotdeb packages over Debian, even if Debian contains a newer version.

i.e. stop apt relying on just the package version number, and previously dotdeb always had a higher one.