A tool for tracking masked updates to stable packages
Hi,
I've just started to do research in order to write a tool which I was
always missing. What I have so far is just a brief "background"
information, explaining the problem - see below.
I thought it might be good to ask here if I'm not trying to reinvent
something that already exists. Or maybe someone has some ideas about
this issue?
| Background
| ----------
|
| Maintaining Debian stable systems sometimes requires installation of
| unofficial versions of packages:
|
| - backporting newer versions, when significant new functionality is
| required on the system but unavailable in the official version found
| in the current stable release. In this case, the version string
| usually sorts as newer than the official stable version string. This
| means that pinning is not necessary, as apt will upgrade such package
| by default.
|
| - making local changes to the official version. In this case, the most
| reliable way is to make the version string sort as older than the
| official one (using the "tilde" feature of dpkg) and force
| installation of such package using pinning. (The other strategy:
| trying to invent a version string newer than the current one, but
| older than the next one is difficult to do reliably.)
|
| In both cases, there is one major drawback: apt will not warn you where
| newer versions of official packages (point releases, security updates)
| will appear in the stable release. This means you may miss some
| important change.
|
| The point of this document is to design a utility whose job is to do
| exactly this: let you track newer official versions of locally overriden
| packages.
|
--
Marcin Owsiany <porridge@debian.org> http://marcin.owsiany.pl/
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