Hi,
On Tue, 2008-11-25 at 16:38:08 -0500, ext Ryan Abel wrote:
> Let's say you've got a user, and this user wants to get to something
> shiny, but the only place this something shiny is available is from an
> unstable testing repository. Normally this unstable testing repository
> would not be the sort of place this user would venture into, but the
> application is only there because a few minor packaging issues have to
> be wrapped up (maybe the l10n is split up into a bunch of separate
> packages); or there's just a few more bugs they want to stomp out; or
> they want to give it a week or two of testing before they push it to
> the unstable repository--whatever, so the user decides (perhaps with
> the encouragement of some of their peers) to dive in, add the unstable
> repository and install the application.
[ Long description of highly unstable repostory usage removed. ]
This is what in Debian is called «experimental».
> Those issues aside, what can we do at an application level to improve
> the user experience here? An opt-in system for Extras-devel updates
> and installs might be useful (rather than offering the Extras-devel
> version, the user has to request it specifically), visual cues to a
> packages origin (color coding, a small icon) and notices might also
> help ("this package is unstable software, and may contain many
> significant bugs, are you sure you want to install it?"), or even some
> sort of apt pinning system to ignore certain updates.
And this is already solved in Debian, by just marking experimental as
to not be used to automatically upgrade packages from there. Apt will
pin it down to priority 1, while unstable has normally priority 500.
The only needed thing is to add an “NotAutomatic: yes” field in the
Release file for experimental.
So, with this, one can select to upgrade to a specific version from
experimental, but this needs to be explicit. Otherwise no other package
will be upgraded from there.
regards,
guillem
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