GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
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Pinning Distributions

With the Debian packaging system you can specify that your packages come by default from one distribution but you can override this with packages from other distributions. The concept is called pinning and after it is set up you can have, for example, testing as your default release and then include unstable in /etc/apt/sources.list and install cdrecord from unstable with:

  # apt-get install cdrecord/unstable

The following /etc/apt/preferences makes apt-get use testing unless it is overridden, even though there are entries for unstable in /etc/apt/sources.list:

  Package: *
  Pin: release a=testing
  Pin-Priority: 900

  Package: *
  Pin: release o=Debian
  Pin-Priority: -10