custom repositories and pinning

[Tom H]

On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 3:50 AM, William Hamra <w.hamra1987 at gmail.com> wrote:
> i have a few packages that i like to build from source every while and
> install them on the system. recently, i started converting them to deb
> packages to get a cleaner install, since i noticed, for example firefox,
> will install to a different directory every version, with a deb package,
> it will clean the old installation and put the new one. this has been
> working good, until today, i noticed something while doing a full
> upgrade. the system wants to download and install amarok. amarok is one
> of the packages i build from source as well, but apparently, my
> versioning scheme is slightly different than ubuntu's, they add a "2:"
> in from of every version, anyways... i decided to put all my deb
> packages in one place, my local webserver accessed on 127.0.0.1, it's
> working. now i just need a way of telling apt or aptitude to ALWAYS
> favour a package in my own archive, regardless of the version number in
> the other repos. i saw in the pinning HowTo in ybuntu's website how i
> can decrease the priority of a an apt source, but i'd rather not
> decrease the priority of several important sources. i would like to know
> if incresing priority of my own archive will do the trick, and if so, to
> how much shall i increase it?

Give your local archive a pin priority between 991 and 999 (inclusively)