apt versions/release special modifiers

Recently the ansible apt module got fnmatch (shell) style wildcard support for installing packages. Aparently this broke the workflow for some users who passed a “*” via a variable to apt to get the candidate version installed.

A more descriptive way of achiving this is to use the one of the special words “candidate”, “installed”, “newest” in the version tag or in the release tag.

For example you can write:

# apt-get install ansible/newest
(or)
# apt-get install 2vcard=candidate

As in the ansible case, this can be a useful default for script that calcuclate a version and need to fallback to a default.