Pengwin: Enable "regular" use of PPAs by removing some pinning rules

[davclark]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
I just spent way too much time trying to get nodejs LTS installed (which is now 14.x, NOT what's installed by your installer - hence my approach to install manually). Turns out you have these pinning rules set up in /etc/apt/preferences:

Package: *
Pin: release a=testing
Pin-Priority: 990

Package: *
Pin: release a=bullseye
Pin-Priority: 991

These rules cause apt and friends to disregard sources at the default priority, which is 500.

Describe the solution you'd like
Get rid of those lines.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Leave it as you like - users continue to struggle with PPAs.

Thanks for all the great work otherwise! I really like the way you support Node now, actually - just want to get latest LTS via apt...

[imaandrew]

I just created a pull request to pengwin-setup that updates both the current and LTS versions of Node.js. Hopefully it is merged soon. I don't know the reasons for the apt pinning rules so I can't help with that.

[crramirez]

Thank you @ThatWeirdAndrew for the contribution

The /etc/apt/preferences are how we control the versions of the packages that we find incompatible with WSL. We will revisit this configuration to see if is too strict.

Thanks for reporting.

[davclark]

I think I understand what you're going for. Definitely, you should keep the pinning rules for your own repositories higher than 500. The issue I have arises from the fact that you are also elevating the priority of the testing source.

I can of course set the priority of manually added PPAs... at a minimum, you might leave some "space" in between testing and bullseye to be able to pin my PPAs in there?

But I realize there is another perhaps more appropriate option, which would be to have specialized tooling for PPAs in pengwin. Perhaps in pengwin-setup? This could insert PPAs at an appropriate priority...

[crramirez]

Pengwin 21.2.1 includes the change that you requested

[davclark]

I noticed and came here to say thank you!

[crramirez]

You are very welcome