Re: New Backports Suite created
On Wed, Oct 06, 2010 at 07:54:23AM +0100, Nick Leverton wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 05, 2010 at 11:03:12AM -0400, Michael Gilbert wrote:
>
> > Understood, and I hope you saw that I corrected my own misunderstanding
> > in the follow-on message. Like I said, it's pretty clear to me now that
> > lenny-backports is actually lenny-backports-from-squeeze and
> > lenny-backports-sloppy is lenny-backports-from-wheezy. Wouldn't those
> > be better names since they're much more self-descriptive?
>
> I don't understand why it matters where a package is backported from.
> Maybe I'm unusual but I think about installing a backport based on what
> features it gives me, not about which other suite has it.
It's because of upgradability. If all your backported packages are from
squeeze, when you upgrade the system to squeeze you'll have a full squeeze
system again, and have a stable baseline to work from once more (install new
backports, upgrade again, etc). When your backports are from all over the
place, it's not possible to make any reasonable assumptions about the
behaviour of the resulting mix of packages. Specifically, Debian doesn't
guarantee that packages will upgrade cleanly past a single release -- so a
package sourced from sid at this time is not required to upgrade cleanly
from the package in lenny.
That being said, if you've got a proper staging/testing environment, it's
certainly possible to test that your particular mix of packages works for
you. If you've got that running right, though, you (or your sysadmin(s))
should have enough knowledge to be able to backport selected packages from
wherever, which also gets you whatever package versions you need directly.
- Matt
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