Debian – How to hold specific package | sleeplessbeastie's notes

There are at least couple ways to hold specific package and prevent it from being updated
as you can use apt, dpkg, aptitude, dselect, apt preferences,
but only the last one is effective in every case.

Solution

The easiest way is to read How APT Interprets Priorities section of the apt_preferences manual page, and use negative priority number.

Read above mentioned manual page to fully understand the consequences.

Example

I will use recently modified pykolab package to quickly describe the whole process.

I replaced pykolab package but the system wants to update it.

# apt-cache policy pykolab
pykolab:
  Installed: 0.5.11-5
  Candidate: 0.5.11-5
  Version table:
     0.5.11-5 0
        501 http://mirror.kolabsys.com/pub/debian/kolab-3.0/ wheezy/updates amd64 Packages
 *** 0.5.11-5 0
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     0.5.11-1 0
        501 http://mirror.kolabsys.com/pub/debian/kolab-3.0/ wheezy/release amd64 Packages

# apt-get upgrade -s
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be upgraded:
  pykolab
1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Inst pykolab [0.5.11-5] (0.5.11-5 Kolab 3.0.x Packages:testing [all])
Conf pykolab (0.5.11-5 Kolab 3.0.x Packages:testing [all])

To solve this problem I created APT preferences /etc/apt/preferences.d/pykolab file where I assigned negative priority number to the pykolab package.

Package: pykolab
Pin: origin "mirror.kolabsys.com"
Pin-Priority: -1

Quick verification that the mentioned problem is now solved.

# apt-cache policy pykolab
pykolab:
  Installed: 0.5.11-5
  Candidate: 0.5.11-5
  Package pin: 0.5.11-5
  Version table:
     0.5.11-5 -1
        501 http://mirror.kolabsys.com/pub/debian/kolab-3.0/ wheezy/updates amd64 Packages
 *** 0.5.11-5 -1
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     0.5.11-1 -1
        501 http://mirror.kolabsys.com/pub/debian/kolab-3.0/ wheezy/release amd64 Packages

# apt-get upgrade -s
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

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Solution

Example