Re: backports.org updates

[bob@proulx.com (Bob Proulx)]

Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> Sven Mueller wrote:
> > Hmm, Is there a way to do that automatically? Personally, I prefer to
> > get bpo updates automatically if they are available.
> 
> As with experimental, you can override this in /etc/apt/preferences. The
> net result of "NotAutomatic: yes" in apt for experimental is that
> packages from that repository get a priority of 1, which signals to apt
> that it shouldn't automatically install stuff from there. If you want
> that, just make sure you have a preferences entry that sets the priority
> back to 500, like the rest of your archives.
> 
> Or whatever else you use, obviously.

The recommendation has been to set it locally in /etc/apt/preferences
to 200 so that:

 * Upgrades of installed packages matching stable will not be offered
   on upgrade by default.

 * Upgrades of packages not matching stable for which a newer one from
   sarge-backports exists will be offered as they become available.

If people have followed the recommendation and installed
/etc/apt/preferences with a sarge-backports setting of 200 then as I
understand and observe things the addition of "NotAutomatic: yes" will
have no effects because it is already overridden.  This is mostly what
people want to have happen.  I think it is a good thing.

This should only change the behavior where people have not set up
/etc/apt/preferences and have only added sarge-backports to the
/etc/apt/sources.list file.  Previously in that case all of
sarge-backports would have been offerred to them to upgrade.  That is
probably undesirable and goes against the spirit of backports.org that
has been expressed repeatedly of installing targeted upgrades.  Now
they will be protected when they don't follow the directions.  Now
they will have to explicitly configure to get that undesirable-for-the-
typical case behavior.  They can still do it if they want to though.

Bob