Pinning publishers

It's not rare when the system has many configured publishers and it becomes necessary to ensure that a package that was installed from one publisher is not updated from another.

Personally, I've seen some situations where an installed package from a very reliable repository was corrupted by an update from another, not-so-reliable repository. That's funny. The same package exists, and it can be installed from two different repositories, but one of these repositories is less reliable, and eventually, it can offer a bad package. This is where pinning becomes useful. I guarantee that a package installed from a source (repository) will always be updated from the same repository. Let's learn how to do this.

Getting ready

To follow this recipe, it's necessary that we have a system (physical or virtual) running Oracle Solaris 11; we log in to the system as the root user and open a terminal. Access to the Internet is optional.

How to do it…

To pin a publisher, we type the following:

root@solaris11:~# pkg set-publisher --sticky solaris

Undoing the configuration is simple:

root@solaris11:~# pkg set-publisher --non-sticky solaris

Note

Any new publisher will be pinned by default.

From now on, every package will always be updated from its original repository even if an update is available from another one.

An overview of the recipe

This is an interesting situation. Usually, an administrator needs a package offered by two different publishers, each one with a determined level of reliability. In this case, we need to choose one of these and create a "sticky channel" to it.