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Re: Bug#293167: ITP: request-tracker3.4 -- Extensible trouble-ticket tracking system



On Thu, Feb 03, 2005 at 10:04:33AM +0100, Florian Weimer wrote:
> * Matthew Palmer:
> 
> >> As a user, I think this is very convenient.  The ability to switch
> >> back to a known-to-work version by tweaking a few configuration files
> >> is reassuring, even if you've tested the new software version on an
> >> indepedent machine.
> >
> > So archive bloat is not a problem for you,
> 
> No, it's not.  If we have incremental Packages files, it's a complete
> non-issue for me.

But we don't, so your problem still exists.  There's also the problem that
an archive which doubled in size would, almost certainly, cause a problem
for a number of mirrors.  Mirrors are kind of important for a distribution
the size of Debian.

> > and "apt-get dist-upgrade" not actually providing upgrades to the
> > latest versions of everything is perfectly fine?
> 
> In quite a few cases, yes.  For example, if data formats change, it's
> usually better not to try to upgrade automatically.  Some maintainers
> ignore this problem entirely (look at the recent libberkeleydb-perl
> breakage for an example of the consequences).

I'm not familiar with the problem, but ignoring the problem is not the
correct means of dealing with it, and I'm not quite sure why you're
advocating doing so.  The proper action is to make your system robust enough
to withstand simple data file format changes.

> There's no guarantee that "apt-get dist-upgrade" will in fact install
> the latest version of anything, so I don't really understand your
> criticism.

Are you happy with having to find *all* of the applications in use on your
system and typing 'apt-get install <list of applications with new version
numbers>' every time you want to upgrade your systems?  Because that is the
end game.  I've already identified two of my packages that I'd like to put
onto a versioned package name basis.  I'm sure that *plenty* of maintainers
would love to do the same thing with their not-trivial-to-upgrade packages.

- Matt

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