Re: writing a release announcement
Osamu Aoki <debian@aokiconsulting.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 27, 2002 at 02:39:22PM -0400, Andrew Pimlott wrote:
>> On Sat, Apr 27, 2002 at 04:28:58PM +0200, Andreas Metzler wrote:
>>> Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> wrote:
>>>> Some things from the woody release notes that we could mention include:
>>>> - apt pinning
[...]
>>> I do not think this should be advertised that widely without a
>>> big warning.
> ??? Why ???
> I think warning should exist not for pinning but for running
> testing/unstable package IN GENERAL.
<Ack.>
The release notes is not targeted to people already accustomed
to testing/unstable and apt's pin feature (and its difficulties).
/You/ understand
| apt pinning, to ease partial upgrades to our testing branch
as "apt pin _eases_ it, but it is still very complicated." Joe user
OTOH will read "apt pin makes it _easy_ to pull selected packages from
testing/unstable", and thinks "Great, if we had this feature in
potato, Ivan could've spared the time backporting KDE to potato,
there'd have been no need for Charl's XFree4 backports, and Adrian
wouldn't have had to hassle with Kernel2.4 for potato."
> Let me try to defend why pin is great from non-programmer's view point.
[You know more about pinning than me, thanks for the link I'll take a
look at it.]
>>> - I assume it won't work well for people running primarily stable
>>> and tracking some packages from testing (or even unstable) - after a
>>> short time (5 months) the dependency-chain is going to pull in
>>> _lots_ of packages from the unstable-part, including first
>>> libc/gcc*/, followed by debconf and X. The resulting mixture'd
>>> probably be less stable than running testing.
> If dependency try to pull something from unstable, if properly set, it
> should stop.
[...]
I cannnot see your argument (probably because mine was undetectable)
If stable users pull foo from unstable they have to fulfil foo's
dependencies, which "after a short time (5 months)" will require
lots of packages from unstable.
The main point I am trying to make is that pinning cannot work
miracles, pulling packages from a unstable will require _big_ updates
and the resulting mixture stable/testing is doomed to be less stable
than full fledged testing.
Don't you think that pinning is almost useless for stable and that its
target is testing-users pulling selective packages from unstable?
cu andreas
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