[H-GEN] Apt pinning - Is there a guru in the house?

[Gary Curtis]

Peoples,

I was playing with apt pinning on one of my systems and can't
seem to get things to work the way I planned. It is rumoured
there is a Debian package guru lurking on this list so I thought
I'd try here first. ;-)  For the record, this is Ubuntu Jaunty.

My goal is to use apt pinning to exclude a set of packages from
ever being installed on the system. The man pages and howtos
say this is possible by using a pin priority less than zero, thus...

In /etc/apt/preferences  (this is the entire file contents)

Package: mono-*
Pin: version *
Pin-Priority: -1

As wildcards are valid for both Package and Pin I expected this
config to exclude any version of any mono-* package.  It does not.
I expected an apt-get install f-spot to fail on dependencies. Nope!
Tried changing the Pin line to  Pin: release v=*   Nope!

I won't copy the entire output of apt-cache policy to the list, suffice
to say that 'Pinned packages' at the end of the output is empty.

Here is the output from apt-cache policy mono-common
mono-common:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 2.0.1-4
  Version table:
     2.0.1-4 0
        500 http://eureka.local jaunty/main Packages

What am I missing here?
(prizes for the best correct answer and best witty retort)
(brownie points for combining the two)

Gaz