Re: Logging practices (and why does it suck in Debian?)
On Sat, Apr 14, 2001 at 07:29:05PM -0700, Tim Uckun wrote:
>
> > Ah, sorry. bigfoot is running unstable, actually. Some of my other
> >machines run testing, but I've got the unstable package repository in my
> >sources.list (and Default-Release "testing"; in /etc/apt/apt.conf, so
> >unstable doesn't get used by default, but I can install packages from it.
> >see apt-preferences(8). I just found this feature in apt a couple weeks
> >ago, and I love it. :)
>
> slightly off topic but..
> I always found this aspect of debian a little puzzling. Debian to me is a
> collection of packages. It makes sense that some of these packages would be
> "stable" and others would be experimental but it never made sense to me
> that just because you subscribe to stable you should be stuck with some
> ancient version of apache, mozilla or whatever.
>
> Ideally the packages themselves should be labled stable, milestone,
> snapshot (or something similar) and you ought to be able to subscribe to
> packages themselves. This way if you trust the authors of a package (say
> postgres) then you could subscribe to postgres snapshot, but if you are not
> so sure about mozzilla you could subscribe to mozilla milestone.
Well, assuming the version of the package in stable is stable, and the
version in unstable is a snapshot, then you can do this with apt. According
to apt-preferences(8), installing a package from unstable will cause your
system to track the unstable version of that package for future upgrades.
This seems to work, from what I've seen :)
/etc/apt/preferences lets you pin packages wherever you want them.
I agree, though, that it would be nice for the .deb to have a tag in its
control info saying whether it was supposed to be stable or what. If anyone
ever decides to add control info, they should add something like that along
with signatures, and other stuff I haven't thought of right now :)
--
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@llama.nslug. , ns.ca)
"The gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish the hours!
Confound him, too, who in this place set up a sundial, to cut and hack
my day so wretchedly into small pieces!" -- Plautus, 200 BCE
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