why no apt.conf?

[TomRoche]

craigevil recommends the debian forum article Howto: Set up and Maintain a Mixed Testing/Unstable System, which says

Here is the key [to Doing it right]. We need to let Apt know which is our preferred update repository. That information comes from the /etc/apt/apt.conf file. If it doesn't exist, create it. It needs to include this line:

Code: Select all

APT::Default-Release "testing";

With that in place, aptitude will first look at testing, and if it sees the program you have identified, it will look no further. In our scenario, since we know we want our application from Unstable, our command will be:

Code: Select all

# aptitude install -t unstable ratpoison

That seems useful. But I note

Code: Select all

me@it:~$ ls -alh /etc/apt/apt*.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2.1K Jul 24  2011 /etc/apt/apt-file.conf

and apt-file.conf serves a very different purpose. So why does LMDE not distribute an apt.conf by default?

[craigevil]

apt.conf is not created by default in Debian. That and the new 'correct' way is to create a file in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/

[TomRoche]

apt.conf is not created by default in Debian.

So? This is LMDE, which by default has a definite, explicit relationship with one repo stream, testing.