Paul E Condon wrote:
On Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 12:09:39AM +0200, David Jardine wrote:On Fri, Sep 02, 2005 at 02:48:33PM -0600, Paul E Condon wrote:<snip>"Don't use release code names in configuring the apt system." seems to me to be a good general rule. As a comment to those who have used code names and think they work: They work only if you have only one release in your sources.list, and then they don't really work, they just don't matter because there is never a choise of release to be made. Personally, I was rather disappointed when I first made this discovery in apt/preferences. I thought I had figured out a neat lazy-man's way to handle the transitions from one stable release to the next. But I won't describe it because I have established that it doesn't work.
I have to agree that this is disappointing. I had thought it made sense to use the release names so that you weren't forced into an upgrade you weren't prepared to do. Not that one could be surprised by the release of a new version....
<<snipp.ing>>
I confess my vast ignorance of how all the developers, release managers, etc do their work on debian, but isn't the whole point of the operation to provide us, as users, with a system that is as easy as possible to use (without MS-type dumbing down, of course)? When we start with debian, we learn about "stable", "testing", etc (by the way, what's the correct word for these things? Are they different releases? distributions? flavours? versions? ...?). We decide what sort of life we want to lead and pick the appropriate thing ("woody", sarge", "etch"...). When a new thingummy becomes the official stable and the others move up, we take advice (from this list, probably) about when to dist-upgrade. We're in control of our system and know that a word like "stable" is not suddenly going to point to something quite different.
What prevents a regular apt-get upgrade from rolling you from woody into sarge? I'm not a complete n00b, but fresh enough to think that if you're set to "stable" that your regular upgrade would have done that. If I had been running stable when sarge was moved up, would my apt-get upgrades have styed pointed to woody until I dist-upgraded? I'm not sure now. My understanding was that by using stable (which I don't BTW) you were assured to get the new release when it came out, but that the system was so well controlled that you'd likely not notice (except for the massive amount of packages being replaced;)
<<nibble nibble>>
<< crunch>>
So, until some time in the far future, people should not say to
newbies that release code names and release status names ('stable',
'testing', etc.) are interchangeable. They are not. Existing support
for release code names is, in fact, quite restricted by comparison.
I stand corrected, and thanks. I made an assumption in that section of my response and consequently made an ass out of Uma Thurmond.
A