Re: apt sugestion

[Mike Mattice <mike@milliways.cx>]

Dan Nguyen writes:
 > On Tue, Nov 23, 1999 at 04:37:02PM +0100, Santiago Garcia Mantinan wrote:
 > > This could be used for example to allow roots to make apt-get upgrades
 > > knowing that their servers will remain like they were before and allowing
 > > them to upgrade them using dpkg or apt but having more care.
 > 
 > Unstable is called unstable for a reason.

	I don't think that's the point he's trying to make.  There's a couple
of different instances where something like this would be good.  As an example,
I don't ever want to just replace apache on my webserver automatically.  
Another would be pcmcia-cs.  I personally build a custom package for my laptop 
instead of using pcmcia-source and building/using that.  
	The real convenience is that I could keep my machines upgraded with
a cron job doing an 'apt-get update ; apt-get -y -d upgrade ; apt-get -y \
safe-upgrade ' without worrying about apache or worse, ssh.

 > Just remember that if your version number is higher than the one
 > available it won't get replaced.

	So we should just watch the version numbers and rebuild it
each time someone releases a higher revision level?  What if another
package depends on that version number specifically?  

	I think the easiest way to implement it would be to have
a couple of more files in /etc/apt.  One called private that lists
the names of private packages and another called safe that lists
the packages we want downloaded, but not installed without a human
watching.


Mike Mattice