[PLUG] How to prevent a particular version of a debian package from upgrading?

[Walt Mankowski <waltman@pobox.com>]

I'm running debian testing.  About a month ago, a buggy version of the
pciutils package made it into the distribution.  Fortunately apt-get
dist-upgrade warned me about the bug reports, but since then I haven't
been able to run "apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade" because I
don't know how to prevent it from upgrading the buggy package.

I currently have version 1:2.1.11-7 of pciutils installed.  The buggy
version is 1:2.1.11-8.  What I'd like to do is tell debian to keep my
current version until it finds a version greater than the -8 version
currently available.

I mentioned this problem at Wednesday night's meeting, and someone
suggested I look into apt_preferences and pinning.  I read through the
apt_preferences(5) manpage.  I didn't have an /etc/apt/preferences, so
I created one with the following in it:

Package: pciutils
Pin: version 1:2.1.11-8
Pin-Priority: -100

As far as I can tell from the documentation, that should prevent that
version of the package from being installed since the Pin-Priority is
less than 0.  But when I run apt-get dist-upgrade, it's still trying
to install it.

Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks.

Walt

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