I'm having to deal with a Debian server, which initially was Squeeze, I believe, but where administrator enabled several distributions:
deb http://mirror.yandex.ru/debian/ stable main contrib non-free deb http://mirror.yandex.ru/debian/ testing main contrib non-free deb http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main contrib non-free deb http://mirror.yandex.ru/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free deb http://mirror.yandex.ru/debian/ experimental main contrib non-free and specified in /etc/apt/apt.conf: APT::Default-Release "testing";.
As a result, when I'm asking aptitude or apt about state of a certain package it bears controversial testimony:
me@server: aptitude search emboss i A emboss - european molecular biology open software suite me@server: aptitude show emboss Package: emboss New: yes State: not installed Automatically installed: yes ... apt-cache show emboss shows information on 4 copies of the package of interest ("emboss"), out of which one copy contains line Status: install ok installed, which means that it is installed, I assume.
Package: emboss Status: install ok installed Priority: optional Section: science Installed-Size: 4020 Maintainer: Debian Med Packaging Team <[email protected]> Architecture: amd64 Version: 6.3.1-6 Depends: emboss-lib (= 6.3.1-6), libc6 (>= 2.7), libexpat1 (>= 1.95.8), libfontconfig1 (>= 2.8.0), libfreetype6 (>= 2.2.1), libgd2-noxpm (>= 2.0.36~rc1~dfsg) | libgd2-xpm (>= 2.0.36~rc1~dfsg), libhpdf-2.1.0 (>= 2.1.0+dfsg), libjpeg62 (>= 6b1), libmysqlclient16 (>= 5.1.21-1), libpng12-0 (>= 1.2.13-4), libpq5 (>= 8.4~0cvs20090328), libx11-6, libxpm4, zlib1g (>= 1:1.1.4), emboss-data (= 6.3.1-6) Recommends: primer3, dialign Suggests: emboss-doc, emboss-test, embassy, clustalw Description: the european molecular biology open software suite EMBOSS is a free Open Source software analysis package specially developed for the needs of the molecular biology (e.g. EMBnet) user community. The software automatically copes with data in a variety of formats and even allows transparent retrieval of sequence data from the web. Also, as extensive libraries are provided with the package, it is a platform to allow other scientists to develop and release software in true open source spirit. EMBOSS also integrates a range of currently available packages and tools for sequence analysis into a seamless whole. EMBOSS breaks the historical trend towards commercial software packages. Homepage: http://emboss.sourceforge.net My questions are: 1) How do I know, from which distribution (stable, testing, unstable, experimental) currently installed version of package was taken? How do I refer to it in commands (e.g. in dpkg -L)? 2) How aptitude commands (show and search) choose, which version of the package they should report? Why algorithms of show and search differ?
P.S. Please, don't reply that creating a mix of distributions is a bad practice. I totally agree, but still have to deal with that machine.
