Suggested 'upgrade-prereq' distribution
I mentioned this idea recently at a deep part of a thread, but somehow
it never seemed to get delivered (at least it's not in the archives)
so it probably didn't get noticed ;-) As the idea is interesting by
itself, I would like to repost this email, edited for the purpose.
The problem is that whenever something like dpkg tries to introduce a
new feature, we have to wait for at least two distributions before we
can assume that people have an up-to-date version.
I propose having a distribution called "upgrade-prereq" (pointing to
upgrade-prereq-woody initially) which contains the package
upgrade-prereq and any *major* packages which are necessary for a
significant number of packages from testing/unstable to work. These
would have to be compiled on a stable system, so that they can be
installed on a stable system. Then we would have to educate users
(debian(-devel)-announce) that for partial upgrades, one must add the
upgrade-prereq distribution to the /etc/apt/sources.list and install
the package upgrade-prereq. This package would have versioned depends
on all of the packages in the upgrade-prereq distribution.
Examples of packages which would be suitable for the upgrade-prereq
distribution:
dpkg for such things as dpkg-log
apt if a new version is needed to handle something special
in testing/unstable
man-db for partial upgrades to potato (FHS issue)
We could even make upgrade-prereq an essential package in the stable
distribution which depends upon the correct versions of these
packages, and somehow (how?) ensure that when upgrading the
distribution, the upgrade-prereq package is upgraded first, pulling in
the versions of the key packages needed for the upgrade.
Does this sound at all reasonable?
Julian
--
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Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, QMW, Univ. of London. J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk
Debian GNU/Linux Developer, see http://www.debian.org/~jdg
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