Bug#693693: ben: Partial suite support

[Iain Lane <iain@orangesquash.org.uk>]

Package: ben
Version: 0.6.3
Severity: wishlist

Hi,

It would be good if ben had support for working with partial suites
(e.g. experimental). One could then stage transitions without having to
host a full repository.

I'm interested in this because we've started using a partial suite for
Ubuntu uploads (series-proposed) before migrating to the release proper,
and it's good to be able to carry on using ben as expected in this
situation. It's in -proposed where transitions will happen.

My current solution is to externally concatenate and deduplicate
Packages/Sources files. The deduplication is required not for ben but
for edos-debcheck (it's interested in finding solutions in the whole
repository but for the transition case we only want to know about
solutions involving the newest packages). It would be good if we could
somehow specify multiple suites in a .ben file and have ben DTRT itself.

Cheers,

-- 
Iain Lane                                  [ iain@orangesquash.org.uk ]
Debian Developer                                   [ laney@debian.org ]
Ubuntu Developer                                   [ laney@ubuntu.com ]