I'm a bit confused about how getdeb.net works now. The last time I got a package from there was a while ago; at that point the procedure was that you would just download a .deb for each package that you wanted to install/upgrade and then install it using dpkg -i. However the inexorable march of progress has lent its trumpets to this system as well, and getdeb installs are now done via their repo, which is registered with apt in /etc/apt/sources.list.d, after you install a single package that makes the changes to the apt database.

I've installed that package, and I've discovered that aptitude dist-upgrade now wants to upgrade a lot of packages on my system that weren't ready for upgrades prior to the installation of the getdeb package. If I rename the file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/getdeb.list to something with a different extension, then do aptitude update && aptitude dist-upgrade, it stops wanting to upgrade packages.

So I gather that the default behaviour is now to upgrade all packages to the version available at getdeb. This is not particularly appropriate, since these packages are not as well tested as the officially released versions.

Is there a config setting somewhere that will prevent upgrading packages to versions from the getdeb repo unless this action is specifically selected? I'd like to be able to pick and choose what packages are upgraded via getdeb.