>>>>> "Michael" == Michael Stone <mst...@debian.org> writes:
Michael> On Wed, Jun 26, 2019 at 09:01:03AM +0800, Paul Wise wrote: >> I also should mention that I use all of stable stable-updates >> proposed-updates and the equivalents for old/oldold. I have them >> in the apt sources of a chdist so I can easily look up old >> versions, do apt-file searches on old versions, look up non-amd64 >> architecture info etc. Michael> Wouldn't it be nicer to have a reliable and simple source Michael> of version ordering rather than relying on ugly names and Michael> symlinks? As a bonus, it would be useful for a lot more Michael> things and for more than n-2 calculations. No, not really. People have enumerated a couple of cases where stable et al are the right cases. You want a sources.list entry that changes what it points to over time. The examples seem to fall into the category of things that intentionally rebuild their environment or things that are providing data based on what is currently Debian's stable/whatever distribution. These are valid use cases and they really do seem to be served better by stable and friends than by things that require the sources.list to change. Testing and unstable have clear demonstrated utility in a sources.list entry as well. --Sam