Re: arches and etch

[Reinhard Tartler <siretart@tauware.de>]

Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de> writes:

> So to see a difference for the smaller archs the upgrade should
> ask. 

The only clean way to do this is IMO a dedicated upgrader tool. This
tool could then have special rules for the following issues:

  * known strange dependency changes like 
    - changes in the priority of packages, 
    - changed dependencies of Priority required/essential packages,
  * known and often installed 3rd party packages like marillats 
    acroread package (remove them if they get in the way 'official'
    debian packages)
  * forced downgrade of specific packages, which many users have updated
    by well known and broken 3rd party repositories (mesa related packages
    from beryl/compiz repositories)
  * obey a special order of package upgrades when dist-upgrading. (think
    of the perl-doc related foo while upgrading from woody to sarge)
  * remove or add new system groups (think of the famous plugdev group)
  * ask the user if he want local users added to the new groups

and of course
  * ask the admin if he wants to participate in pocon

This is of course an etch+1 thing, and really specific for a given
release.

You can of course imagine that these ideas don't come out of the
blue. In fact, such a tool is already deployed in ubuntu. I think we
could port it to debian as well, if enough people see a need for it.

-- 
Gruesse/greetings,
Reinhard Tartler, KeyID 945348A4