Thanks for your well thought reply and advice.
I have already applied your suggestions on the pinning strategy.

I knew already how to filter with aptitude, but I didn't know the
reference, thank you for the information.

Some days ago I updated my basement pc from Jessie to Beowulf and It was
all messed up.
I managed to recover it, so I guess, if something happens to the one I am
asking about, I will (hopefully) be able to recover it too :)

Cheers!
Antonio

On Wed, Mar 17, 2021 at 7:29 PM Florian Zieboll <f.zieboll@???> wrote:

> On Wed, 17 Mar 2021 16:18:03 +0100
> "Antonio Trkdz.tab" <antoniotrkdz@???> wrote:
>
> > Thank you Florian for your good advice on pinning strategy.
> > What I am really scared of is if having installed different gcc
> > packages could screw up my system.
> > Does your strategy take into account this, i.e. is your suggestion a
> > way to take care of such situations?
> > did you have any such problems deriving from 'aggressively' mixing up
> > releases?
>
>
> Hallo Antonio,
>
> I am not into mixing 'aggressively' and usually don't have more than a
> handful of packages (plus dependencies) from at most three "alien"
> repositories - and it's really long ago that I messed up a system in a
> way that was irrecoverably (for me).
>
> That said: I suppose, that if you don't go beyond "testing", the
> packages' dependencies won't change in a way that would endanger your
> system by just updating - of course given that you took care during the
> initial installation of the "non native" packages.
>
> But please take my words with a good pinch of salt; on this list there
> are much more experienced sysadmins than I am, who might have the one or
> other cent to add to these my two lentejas! (Not sure if silence has to
> mean consent - it might be a mail filter towards /dev/null as well;-)
>
> NB, as it took me a while to figure out how to do it: With aptitude, you
> can easily filter installed packages by archive name or origin (URL):
>

>     $ aptitude search "?narrow(~i, ~A$archive)"
> or
>     $ aptitude search "?narrow(~i, ~O$origin)"

>
> Of course, $archive and $origin need to be replaced or defined. Also, if
> you don't know it already, I recommend to have a look at the aptitude
> search term reference, it can be *VERY* useful:
> https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/aptitude/ch02s04s05.en.html
>
>
> libre Grüße,
> Florian
>