Re: Apt repository interoperability, again
On Sun, 20 Apr 2008 21:12:25 +0200, José L. Redrejo Rodríguez
<jredrejo@edu.juntaextremadura.net> wrote:
El dom, 20-04-2008 a las 20:37 +0200, Herman Robak escribió:
You see, I'm quite embarrassed by the Debian switcharoo:
...
2) Answer complaints about lacking the latest and greatest by
pointing to Sid (the latest) or unofficial repositories
(patent-encumbered stuff)
...
For many users (2) is unavoidable. And when you do that,
you are on your own. Not many gentle safety features are
offered, just a bunch of Really Powerful and Fully Tweakable
options for the proper expert.
What to do about that? Say "Use Ubuntu"?
Sorry, but I don't understand your point:
1) is compatible with 2) whenever you don't mix things. In my personal
pc's, I'm a happy Debian testing user since more than a year and never
had any problem. What I don't try to do is messing stable with testing.
You can not tell that to the users (or even worst, stable with sid)
About patents: there's some discussion now in Debian to recover the
non-US branch. In fact it would be non-US_DE_JP, for the rest of the
world who are not (too) worried for stupid patents laws.
That will help for _one_ important case. (which is good, by all means)
I don't know
what will happen with this discussion, but in the meantime I've been
using debian testing with debian-multimedia.org repository for testing
(again don't-mix-distributions) for some family and friends and never
had any problem either.
So, what's the problem again?: Mixing distributions (testing-stable-sid)
or even Debian with Ubuntu-with-some-strange-name-version .
The Debian Switcharoo was a subset of what concerns me. You suggested
workarounds or policies for most of that. The full extent of the, um,
challenge is manyfold. It about unrealised potential, IMO.
1 a) There are MANY Debian derivatives. Not all of them are binary
incompatible with Debian proper. Cherrypicking packages from them
could be a killer feature if common sense (check your own distro
first! Check compability!) was enforced.
1 b) No matter how much you yell NOOOOO!!! to the above, users are
inclined to think it's a great idea and do it anyway. I think it
is prudent to continue leading them when they go down that path
instead of saying that all bets are off.
(When you are saying "you don't want to do that", think again!)
2) Certain software will come from third parties, and some of them
will have APT repositories. I know those tend to be third parties
because we wouldn't like them in Debian in the first place (like
lacking DFSG compliance).
Still, I would consider it a Good Thing if third parties were
able to tell APT explicitly which upstream repository they depended
on. If the user chose the wrong line from "Xandros apt source",
"Debian apt source" and "whatever derivative apt source" then APT
could warn the user before he hosed his system.
3) Automation is good. If a repository maintainer really intend
to be compatible with repository foo, he should be pleased if
a broken compability is flagged right away. Just like we like
the compiler to throw an error at compile time, instead of the
program crashing.
--
Herman Robak
Reply to: