Re: upgrading only urgency=high packages
On Tue, May 01, 2001 at 07:56:10PM -0700, Francois Gouget wrote:
> On Tue, 1 May 2001, Matt Zimmerman wrote: [...]
> > I had an idea (and a working script) to extract changelogs from source
> > packages and insert them into a SQL database. My original intention was to
> > allow apt-listchanges to display changelogs for packages before downloading
> > them, but such a database would also allow for queries like this. It would
> > also allow the CGI changelog viewer to work again.
>
> <day-dreaming> Yum. I'd love to see the changelog in dselect before I decide
> whether to upgrade a package or not. </day-dreaming> :-)
>
> Maybe this could be made available as part of the 'Packages' system. I don't
> mind the time it would take to download all this extra information but it
> should probably be optional (kind of related to people complaining the
> Packages files should not contain the description).
I discussed the idea a bit with James Troup, and one of his concerns was that
the database would be centralized, not distributed over many mirrors like the
packages themselves. This would be a scalability problem if such a system were
to become popular. Judging by the response that apt-listchanges received, and
the interest people have in the idea, it just might.
As you suggest above, maybe the solution is to use a file-based system rather
than an interactive database query as I had envisioned. Package changelogs
could be extracted from source packages and stored (compressed) in the archive
somewhere. Then, retrieving the changelog for a package would be as easy as
http://my.favorite.mirror/debian/dists/blah/changelogs/source_package.txt.
Some changelogs, like those in the XFree86 packages, are over 60kb compressed,
but most of them seem to be less than 10k, according to a quick manual survey
on my system.
--
- mdz
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