On Wed, 02 Dec 2015, Mitt Green wrote:

> Good day everyone, 
>
> As some of you have probably
> noticed, Unstable had received
> their updates for APT, version 1.1.
> It had been in Experimental for long time
> and now it landed.
>
> Starting from this version pinning
> (i.e. preventing from being installed)
> packages this way:
> -------------------------------------------
> Package: foo
> Pin: release *
> Pin-Priority: -1
> -------------------------------------------
> doesn't work anymore.

Are there alternatives for preventing packages to be installed?

We need to decide if to incorporate this change also into Devuan.

Many people will be negatively affected by yet another limitation of
their freedom, being now unable to choose if a certain package should be
installed on their system.

I am wondering what is Debian's rationale to do something like that?
anyone has more insights?

We are not affected: Devuan has never relied on pinning to protect our
freedom from the systemd avalanche, but some people do and this move
looks like the DD's left in the Debian project want to shovel their
decisions down the throat of all users.

ciao