Re: Proposa: New header to specify how important an upgrade is.
> > 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 :-).)
But that's an heuristic that can be wrong. Perhaps the fix in sysvinit is
very simple yet very important... Or perhaps there's a package that haven't
been updated in 3 months, becaus is good, and it hasn't got problems, and
you end up downloading a package that it's not really `actively maintained'
but `actively uploaded'... =)
> 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.
A general query interface for the online package manager. =)
And now that we are dreaming... I'd like apt-get to be hable to download a
patch for Packages.gz... not the whole file... perhaps having a set of
patches.. I don't know.. perhaps with rsync... And it would be better to
also have a Packages.bz2.
> [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.
Don't you hate those ` * Changed maintainer.' uploads? =)
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