On Sat, Dec 26, 1998 at 03:01:01PM -0800, Oscar Levi wrote: > On Mon, Dec 21, 1998 at 03:15:49PM -0500, Buddha Buck wrote: > > Mr. Levi, > How formal. %^) I greet you, Sir, and you, humble followers of this mailing list, with salutations and the best wishes of the season, > > [stuff deleted] > > > > Is this what you envisioned the proposal would be like? > > It sounds similar. I don't think that changing the names is the most > important facet of the proposal. Let me clarify that I think there > are two problems: > > 1) Just before release, it takes a long time for package updates to > make their way into the mirrored archives so that we can test > them. This is due to the appropriate caution of the release > manager(s). > 2) Performing incremental updates to a running system is desirable > for the sake of testing. Packages will be upgraded and > downgraded in order to isolate problems or return a broken system > to a working state. Okay, the prerelease proposal wasn't intended to help or hinder those goals. It's major purposes was to make it so we could make releases when we wanted to, rather than having to havecontinually have extended freezes while we wait for the last few bits of a release to come together. But anyway... > The second problem is due to the fact that we cannot presently install > systems that are partially in one distribution and another. For > example, we cannot easily mix potato and slink when there are > conflicting library updates. Library updates should only conflict if there's no possible way around it. The only times that doesn't work is when maintainers make mistakes or bad decisions. Since we're not perfect, there's not much we can do to stop this, so working around it's the only real option. And since we've got a fairly good dependency system, that's not too much of a problem. If you want to install the new libc6 from unstable, all you need to do is add: deb http://foo/debian unstable main to apt/sources, run apt-get update, and apt-get install libc6. Everything it depends on (or depends on it in a versioned way) gets updated, nothing else does, and you're happy. What we don't have is some way to revoke that decision, say "Okay, that was fun, but I want to go back to frozen. Buggy junk", and downgrade the packages you just installed to ones that work. The new Apt UI may have some support for this, but I'm not sure. (I'm not quite sure what the UI-doc means when it discusses this functionality) In any case, this requires changes to the tools, not the ftp site, afaict. I've no doubt that the Apt team would appreciate a hand with the coding of said tools, either. Cheers, aj -- Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/> I don't speak for anyone save myself. PGP encrypted mail preferred. ``Like the ski resort of girls looking for husbands and husbands looking for girls, the situation is not as symmetrical as it might seem.''
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