Re: Future of Debian uncertain?
On Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 04:59:42PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 12:12:40AM -0600, Steve Langasek wrote:
> > [...] But while I want Debian to be an empowering operating system
> > that grows with the user, I think any strategy that expects users to
> > also be administrators is a losing one -- no matter how easy we make it
> > to administer that system.
>
> Who do you think should administer the systems used by random people
> at home?
This is a good question. Who administers the system for the Mac users? For
the XP Home users? Acquitances or commercial support entities.
> > [...] -- but I think the way to do that is by giving those
> > doctors pre-configured systems, not by giving them a box of CDs [...]
>
> This fails when it's time to do security updates, or an update of the
> entire system; running "apt-get dist-upgrade" will quite happily ask you
> lots of things that Joe User shouldn't need to know. For a doctor, this
> is fine: they can hire a consultant to keep the system up to date. For
> a home user, that doesn't seem as reasonable.
I was under impression that for security updates, a regular apt-get upgrade
is enough. It could be done via daily cronjob.
But for the problem:
- ship default apt config with distro codename instead for stable in network
sources list (this area of the config managed by debconf)
- a trivial program could do the following once a day or a week
* check if network connection is avaliable, if yes:
* connect to predefined location on www.debian.org to obtain
versioning information
* if new stable is avaliable display the following info (I imagine a X
display below, similar for console):
+---------------------------------------------------------+
| |
| A new stable version of Debian GNU/Linux is avaliable. |
| The version codenamed <foo> was released on <date>. |
| |
| The current version you are running, codenamed <bar> |
| will cease to be supported for bugfixes on <date>. |
| |
+------------------[ ok ]-[more info]---------------------+
And [more info] will show information on running version-update and some apt
frontend.
I imagine version-update to be a script that basically does the following:
- exchanges release codename in debconf area of apt.conf for new one
- runs apt-get update and/or some apt frontend.
Alex
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