Use of priorities

[Edward Diener]

I do not understand the use of priorities for channels in Smart. I 
thought I did understand but evidently the priority number works 
differently than the way I thought it would or I just am not using it in 
the right way.

I wanted a priority system which does not show updates to a package if 
the priority of the channel which has the update is lower than the 
priority of the channel which has supplied the current version of a 
package. This would keep me from updating a package from a channel of a 
lower priority, thus possibly breaking a distribution. When I tried this 
in Smart 1.2 I notice that Smart will still list updates to packages 
from channels that have lower priorities than the channel from where the 
previous version of the package came, when one chooses to hide any 
package that is not an update. This puzzles me since I thought the 
priority, as it related to channels, was meant to prevent this situation.

Does priority, therefore, only apply to installations of a new package 
and, if so, how does that work ? How can I use Smart so that it does not 
list an update a package with a later release over another channel where 
the package was previously installed or updated, when I do not want to 
use the first channel to override packages from the second channel ? I 
think this is a very common occurence: one has a set of base channels, 
and then one has a 3rd party channel, and one does not want the 
particular 3rd party channel to be used to update packages in one of the 
base channels, but only to supply new packages and updates of thoe packages.