Dear Maintainer,

With "apt-get install -t", a package and all its dependencies are
installed from the given release. There seems to be no way to achieve
the same behavior with apt preferences. While it's possible to specify
a glob or regexp for package names in apt preferences, any dependent
packages that don't match won't be installed from the given
release. The use case for this functionality is in systems managed by
configuration management software (e.g. puppet), where it's much more
straightforward to specify behavior in a configuration file than via
flags to a specific command.

For example, I need the newer functionality of the version of
syslog-ng in wheezy backports. With the following apt_preferences file:

"apt-get install syslog-ng" gives this error:

This is because libmongo-client0 doesn't match the glob "syslog-ng*"
in the preferences file.

However, "apt-get -t wheezy-backports install syslog-ng" correctly
installs all the dependencies from backports.

Control: tag -1 wontfix

Package: *
Pin: release a=<VALUE PASSED TO -t>
Pin-Priority: 990

it does not do anything special for dependencies.

Marking as wontfix.