[sf-lug] John the Ripper

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Alex Kleider (a_kleider at yahoo.com):

> by the way, if I am to pull it in from the sid/unstable repository, I
> may need a little refresher course on how to do that: make an
> appropriate entry in the /etc/sources file? 

Really quick (and apologies if this is unclear on account of excessive
terseness):

My Debian-testing system has this in sources.list:

deb ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free
deb ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main non-free contrib

deb http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib non-free

deb-src http://security.debian.org testing/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main non-free contrib



It has this in /etc/apt/preferences :


Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 50


The experts in Debian on the technique of "pinning" tell me I'm doing
this bass-ackwards.  They're right, but it works.

The "50" is a sub-normal priority number, since 100 = normal.  What it
says is "treat any packages from the "unstable" branch as deprecated by
default, such that they're never fetched unless requested by explicit
branch name.  (Normal usage of pinning is to give a _greater_ than 100
priority to things you wish to favour.)

Net effect is to allow commands like this:

#  apt-get  -t unstable  install konqueror

This means "Install the Konqueror package, but please grab it (and any 
dependency required to install it) in the version offered by the
'unstable' repositories, as a special exception to the normal default
selection of the 'testing' repositories as system-default."


If you look around in http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Debian/ , you'll find at
least one reference link about "pinning" that gives you the
more-orthodox explanation.