Michael,

If all you have is the stable branch in your sources.list, then you won't
have access to any of the testing packages, even if you specify testing on
the command line with apt-get. apt-get has to know where to find the
package you want to download, which is why sources.list exists. If you want
to be able to install both testing and stable packages, then you have to
have both stable and testing branches listed in your sources.list.

If you want to hold a package to a specific version or branch (stable,
testing, experimental), then you can "pin" that package to that version,
and all future updates will only use that version. Take a look at
http://jaqque.sbih.org/kplug/apt-pinning.html. However, you still have to
have the correct repositories listed in sources.list, and you have to run
an apt-get upgrade to update the local cache so the OS knows where to find
the packages you want.

Hope that helps!

Mark

On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 1:02 AM, Michael Havens <bmike1@gmail.com> wrote:

> A specific version of a package can be selected for installation by
> following the package name with an equals (=) and the version of the
> package to select. This will cause that version to be located and selected
> for install. Alternatively, a specific distribution can be selected by
> following the package name with a slash (/) and the version of the
> distribution or the Archive name (i.e. stable, testing, unstable).
>
> source: http://linux.die.net/man/8/apt-get
>
>
> So this is saying to me you don't need the PPA to install the latest
> version but can instead do:
> <package>=<version>
>
> If that is so we don't need to add PPAs to our systems. IN other words
> PPAs are just a way to make it so that we are always running the latest
> version of the package regardless of if it works whereas we choose what we
> want to run with:
> <package>=<version>
> That is very Linuxy of them!
> :-)~MIKE~(-:
>
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