[solved] Prevent updates to firefox beta releases?

[doctordruidphd]

I'm posting this here because the question really cuts across different versions.

Today, among the natty upgrades, was one that "upgraded" firefox 4 to firefox 5, which is still a beta version, and therefore broke all of my extensions and themes. I'm not happy about that, and I want to:

1. Revert to firefox 4 (I do have a backup of my ~/.mozilla directory), and

2. Prevent updates from installing beta versions of firefox.

As far as I can tell, I do not have any repositories installed for beta firefox's; this may have come from backports, or ??. At this point, it seems my only option is to download ff from the mozilla site and install it in /opt. But that means running the 32 bit version, which means flash nightmares again. I am really not impressed with the beta firefoxs, so I'd rather not have them.

I can probably deal with (2) by holding the package. Any suggestions as to other ways of dealing with (1)?

[doctordruidphd]

Re: Prevent updates to firefox beta releases?

OK - replying to my own post:

What I discovered is I had the proposed repository active -- didn't think I did, but that's where firefox 5 came from.

So what I did:
Deactivated proposed
apt-get update
Then using synaptic, because installing and removing firefox takes other things with it,
removed and reinstalled firefox & its associated programs.

I suspect I can keep it from reloading by pinning it to whichever stable repository it resides in.

Well, sorry for posting something simple, but it might be instructive after all.

[MoonRise]

Re: [solved] Prevent updates to firefox beta releases?

Well, at least it made me check my system so that doesn't happen to me, so this was a good post in that respect. Thanks!

[doctordruidphd]

Re: [solved] Prevent updates to firefox beta releases?

@MoonRise:
This is what I get for not following my own advice, and that is, NEVER do a dist-upgrade without checking carefully exactly what is going to be upgraded.

Onward...

For others who may be interested, what follows is a brief explanation of how to pin firefox to a particular repository. What this enables you to do is use a more adventurous repository -- like experimental, or proposed -- and at the same time keep certain of your applications from updating. You can, by the way, expand upon this method to select which repositories each application comes from. This can get very complicated, but it can be very useful as well.

Why do this, instead of just issuing a hold? You probably want to receive incremental updates to the application, that may plug security holes, but don't break important functionality. A hold prevents any updating. That's not exactly what I wanted.

I am going to stick with firefox in this example, though you could choose a different application.

apt-cache policy

This will display a list of the repositories active on your system. The first number is the priority, and the higher the number, the higher the priority. If we want to "pin" an application to a specific repository, then we will need to assign a higher priority to the "pin" than the repositories we don't want to download it from. In my case, the highest priority listed is 500.

apt-cache policy firefox

This is the output of this command AFTER doing an apt-get update, and BEFORE doing the apt-get dist-upgrade:

firefox:
 Installed: 4.0.1+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.11.04.3
 Candidate: 5.0~b5+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.11.04.1
 Version table:
   5.0~b5+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.11.04.1 0
    500 [url]http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/[/url] natty-proposed/main amd64 Packages
 *** 4.0.1+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.11.04.3 0
    500 [url]http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/[/url] natty-updates/main amd64 Packages
    100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
   4.0.1+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.11.04.1 0
    500 [url]http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/[/url] natty-security/main amd64 Packages
   4.0+nobinonly-0ubuntu3 0
    500 [url]http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/[/url] natty/main amd64 Packages

You can see from this that the installed version of firefox is 4.0.1+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.11.04.3 0 from the natty-updates repository, which has a priority of 500. However, 5.0 beta is lurking just above it, coming from the natty-proposed repository, just waiting to be installed.

Interlude: Why does the version in natty-updates get installed, when the version in natty-security has the same priority (500)? Answer: if several repositories have the same priority, the one with the highest revision number wins.

OK, so here's what we need to do to prevent the version from natty-proposed from installing:

Go to the /etc/apt/preferences.d directory. You will need to create a new file called firefoxwith whatever editor you use, and you will need to be sudo (or kdesudo) to do it.
Put the following in the file:

Package: firefox firefox-globalmenu firefox-gnome-support
Pin: release a=natty-updates
Pin-Priority: 600

The "Package" line specifies what packages we are pinning. I found, using synaptic, that the firefox upgrade wanted to pull in firefox-globalmenu and firefox-gnome-support along with it, so I decided to pin those as well. There may be a fancier way to find those specific dependencies.

The "Pin" line tells apt what we want to do, in this case, give the version in natty-updates preferential treatment. My assumption here is that while firefox is a beta release, it won't show up there.

The "Pin-Priority" line tells apt to give our choice a higher priority than what is in the other repositories.

After this, do an apt-get update so apt will read the new priorities. Now an apt-cache policy firefox shows:

firefox:
 Installed: 4.0.1+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.11.04.3
 Candidate: 4.0.1+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.11.04.3
 Package pin: 4.0.1+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.11.04.3
 Version table:
   5.0~b5+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.11.04.1 600
    500 [url]http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/[/url] natty-proposed/main amd64 Packages
 *** 4.0.1+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.11.04.3 600
    500 [url]http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/[/url] natty-updates/main amd64 Packages
    100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
   4.0.1+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.11.04.1 600
    500 [url]http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/[/url] natty-security/main amd64 Packages
   4.0+nobinonly-0ubuntu3 600
    500 [url]http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/[/url] natty/main amd64 Packages

The "candidate" line is now saying that the current version will not be upgraded, even though a newer version is available from another source.

Whew! Now my themes and extensions are all safe and sound. For today.

Edit: fix spelling

[GreyGeek]

Re: [solved] Prevent updates to firefox beta releases?

Excellent post!

I love this forum! It teaches me something new every day.
Thanks doctordruidphd!

[MoonRise]

Re: [solved] Prevent updates to firefox beta releases?

Excellent post!

I love this forum! It teaches me something new every day.
Thanks doctordruidphd!

+1

[PhilT]

Re: [solved] Prevent updates to firefox beta releases?

Amen to that!

In fact I'm showing the symptoms of a serious addict. Without my daily KFN "fix" I feel quite sweaty, anxious, deprived .... and, if KFN won't load I get rather agitated. Anybody suggest a cure? (No I'm not going to stop coming back - but, perhaps, a dose of Valium Too much coffee gives me palpitations >)

[wizard10000]

Re: [solved] Prevent updates to firefox beta releases?

Here's another good read on the process. It doesn't cover specific applications but does show you how to assign priorities to different repositories -

http://wiki.debian.org/AptPreferences

I tried this with Squeeze and had testing, unstable, multimedia and backports repos enabled and could pull applications from any of them but apt defaulted to Squeeze repos.

[GreyGeek]

Re: [solved] Prevent updates to firefox beta releases?

...
Anybody suggest a cure?
...

Sure, keep KFN up all the time. Those symptoms will never return!