Pinning and local repos

Question

I can't quite wrap my head around pinning in Debian. I'm trying to automatically install a package first from our local project repo, then from our local stable repo and then from official Debian repo, fulfilling dependencies as needed in the same order.

So I have three repos in /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://our-stable-repo/ our-squeeze-stable main
deb http://official-debian-repo/ squeeze main
deb http://our-project-repo/ our-project main

Release files are as follows, our-stable-repo:

Origin: Ourname
Label: Ourname
Suite: our-squeeze-stable
Components: backports main
Architectures:  
MD5Sum:
 [...]
SHA1:
 [...]

and our-project-repo:

Origin: Ourname
Label: Ourname
Archive: our-project
Component: main
Architecture: amd64

All our packages are in our-stable-repo and our-project-repo. I want to test a package from our-project-repo, which will have few dependencies from the same, and some (those which are not to be tested) from our-stable-repo.

Now I set up my /etc/apt/preferences:

Package: *
Pin: release a=our-project
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: *
Pin: release a=our-squeeze-stable
Pin-Priority: 750

Package: *
Pin: release a=squeeze
Pin-Priority: 600

so I expect apt to try and install any package from our-project first.

But that does not happen; our-our-squeeze-stable seems to always "win". And even providing -t our-project on a command line does not help. Only way how I was able to make apt install my package from the project repo was removing other sources, but that way I ended up with broken dependencies.

I tried to debug with apt-cache policy, but that's even more confusing:

root@test:~# apt-cache policy
Package files:
 100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     release a=now
 500 http://our-project-repo/ our-project/main amd64 Packages
     origin our-project-repo
 500 http://official-debian-repo/debian-security/ squeeze/updates/non-free amd64 Packages
     release v=6.0,o=Debian,a=oldstable,n=squeeze,l=Debian-Security,c=non-free
     origin official-debian-repo
 500 http://official-debian-repo/debian-security/ squeeze/updates/contrib amd64 Packages
     release v=6.0,o=Debian,a=oldstable,n=squeeze,l=Debian-Security,c=contrib
     origin official-debian-repo
 500 http://official-debian-repo/debian-security/ squeeze/updates/main amd64 Packages
     release v=6.0,o=Debian,a=oldstable,n=squeeze,l=Debian-Security,c=main
     origin official-debian-repo
 500 http://official-debian-repo/debian/ squeeze/non-free amd64 Packages
     release v=6.0.7,o=Debian,a=oldstable,n=squeeze,l=Debian,c=non-free
     origin official-debian-repo
 500 http://official-debian-repo/debian/ squeeze/contrib amd64 Packages
     release v=6.0.7,o=Debian,a=oldstable,n=squeeze,l=Debian,c=contrib
     origin official-debian-repo
 500 http://official-debian-repo/debian/ squeeze/main amd64 Packages
     release v=6.0.7,o=Debian,a=oldstable,n=squeeze,l=Debian,c=main
     origin official-debian-repo
 750 http://our-stable-repo/ our-squeeze-stable/main amd64 Packages
     release o=Ourname,a=our-squeeze-stable,l=Ourname,c=main
     origin our-stable-repo
Pinned packages:
root@test:~# 

Why in this apt-cache policy output the project repo has still 500?

Is there something wrong with this setup?

Answer 1

 500 http://our-project-repo/ our-project/main amd64 Packages
     origin our-project-repo

Note the lack of a release line. That's important, because you're trying to set a pin on a release field. Most likely, you don't have a proper Release file in your archive (or, at least, it doesn't have the fields set).

Not sure what you're using to maintain your package archive, but (e.g.,) for mini-dinstall, you need to set the release_* config options. You can check in /var/lib/apt/lists to find the current release file apt-get has for your archive (if any). If you watch an apt-get update closely, you can see it downloading (or failing to download) the release file as well as related stuff (like Release.gpg, the signature for the release file).

If you can't fix your release file, set a pin on the origin instead:

Package: *
Pin: origin "our-project-repo"
Pin-Priority: 900