Re: Proposa: New header to specify how important an upgrade is.
On 17-Jan-00, 20:12 (CST), Nicolás Lichtmaier <nick@debian.org> wrote:
> Last-update it's completely another story... It would tell you another
> thing... (less useful, I think).
Last-critical-update is definetly cool. What "last-update" tells you
(sometimes, and certainly not completely accurately) how active the
maintainer is. If I have a choice of several packages that do similar
things (e.g. mp3 player, or cd writer), I probably won't choose the one
that is version 0.3-1, and hasn't been updated in 6 months: it's a dead
project (probably). On the other hand, I don't like to install critical
packages (bash, libc6, dpkg) from unstable that haven't been in the
archive for at least a few days. (I run my main home machine bleeding
edge, but I can't bring myself to hand the razors with no handles :-).)
And as someone else pointed out, a changelog delta between installed and
available would be much more useful.
Hmm, as long as we're throwing out feature ideas, it would be cool if
the package browsers (dselect, aptitude, whatever) could (on demand) go
out to the website and just get and display the changelog for a package.
It would be way useful (no, I don't need to re-install tetex[1] because
he fixed a spelling error in the README file...) and wouldn't require
that any of the other tools or files change.
Steve
[1] I picked tetex because it's one of those big and takes a long time
to install packages, not because the maintainer as ever[2] actually done
a new release to (only) fix a typo.
[2] Not that I remember, any way.
--
Steve Greenland <vmole@swbell.net>
(Please do not CC me on mail sent to this list; I subscribe to and read
every list I post to.)
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