apt-get install antidote

New Distro #73

OK, so I've started to play with Ubuntu. Kick-ass distribution. Installed without a hitch on a server, a desktop machine, 4 Sony laptops and one Dell laptop. And by 'installed' I mean: got the screen resolution, sound, and network cards right, first try, no human intervention. Two different kinds of wireless network cards in that group, and the server's network card is a funky dual Intel one that no other distribution has picked up yet out of the box. Knoppix couldn't even do that.

There's one small problem, and it is small (smaller than I thought it was, even): not all Debian packages are available out of the box. They only support a subset (a large subset) of Debian's recent vintage packages.

I needed winbind, first thing, and that package is not in Ubuntu. So I did what I have been told time and again never to do: I added the Debian sid archive to /etc/apt/sources.list and fired up Synaptic to install the winbind package. This went off without a hitch, but on my next upgrade I ended up upgrading hundreds of packages to sid, since sid is now slightly more recent than Ubuntu for very uninteresting reasons.

Oops

This messed up Ubuntu's nice desktop layout. Realizing I didn't want to keep it that way, I then removed the sid repositories from sources.list and then downgraded to the Ubuntu versions of a few of the desktop packages using an old apt trick:

$ sudo apt-get install gnome-system-tools=1.0.0-0ubuntu7

This was fine, got my desktop back to pretty again. I knew I still had loads of "foreign" packages installed on my system, but I resolved not to think about it too hard.

But pretty soon I needed another package. This one happened to be python-dev. The Python package structure in Debian (and therefore Ubuntu) is a rat's nest of weird, exact-version dependencies. If you try to mix repositories on Python, you will end up reinstalling hundreds of packages, even using the trick above. Wait, that's an exaggeration: in my case, the number was actually 76 packages that had to be reinstalled because I • already had Debian's sid version of Python installed and • needed to install one from Ubuntu. In order to use the apt trick above to fix this problem, I would have had to look up the most recent Ubuntu version of all 76 of those packages (using apt-cache showpkg) and then type each one on the command line. If I'm smart, maybe I could write a little Python code to help me build the list, but it would still be a monstrous pain in the ass.

I have torn my hair out on this issue many times before, when I did things like install Debian sarge and then install everything from backports.org, or try to add one sid package to a woody system and end up installing hundreds of unwanted packages. My conclusion has always been: you can't go back. You're stuck with your mixed repositories, and you'll end up upgrading everything under the sun. Hope everything keeps working right! :-)

You Can Go Home Again

Turns out that's not true. The solution turns out to be quite simple. There's a file called apt_preferences by the man page. It's in /etc/apt/preferences. It controls where you get packages from, and under what conditions, when you have multiple sources in sources.list. It makes filters by combining groups of three facts:

• What packages the filter applies to, with "Package:"
  
• Where those packages come from, with "Pin:"
  
• How high a priority you want to set for the filtered packages, with "Pin-Priority:"
  

Basically you say, "for these packages, if they're coming from this location, install them with this much priority." You can, for example, use apt_preferences to set a priority of 0 which says "Don't install the package from here, ever." I wanted just the opposite, the most forceful priority possible. A priority > 1000 says "Install packages from this location, no matter what, even if they're less recent than the one already installed." Used like this, it forces Ubuntu to downgrade everything on your system to the version in Ubuntu:

Package: *
Pin: release a=warty
Pin-Priority: 1001

Once you've made this setting, just do an apt-get upgrade. I don't promise it'll be smooth as glass; packages aren't tested for downgrading, let alone downgrading across distributions. At worst you will have to run it a few times, and possibly manually select a few packages to remove completely to prevent conflicts, but it does work. I just used it to downgrade 466 packages from sid to warty. :-)

So then they tell me about the universe repository, which is where I should have found winbind. . .

By the Way

Don't forget to change your apt_preferences back to the way it comes out of to the box (missing). Just delete it when you're done. Otherwise, you won't get security updates, because warty/security doesn't match the Pin you specified in apt_preferences. Once you've gotten rid of the preferences file, do another apt-get upgrade and you'll re-get the most recent security updates.

Update

In addition to universe, I recently learned how to enable the multiverse repository and I feel it deserves a mention because useful things like browser plugins live there. Add this to your sources.list:
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ warty multiverse