Re: apt - priorities?

["B. Bell" <maximill@u.washington.edu>]

On 10 Aug 1998, David Z. Maze wrote:
> B Bell <maximill@u.washington.edu> writes:
> BB> and either way, for all of the packages which are in both hamm and slink,
> BB> dselect wants to upgrade to the slink versions...
> 
> slink tends to have newer versions of things than hamm, so APT tries
> to download things from there.  Given identical file versions, APT
> will download a file from the first site listed, but if the file on
> one site is newer than the other than it will get the newer file.

Whoops, I missed the part about the packages having identical versions.
But, I think that many people would be much happier if they could run a
stable system, and not have to track by hand upgrades of the few unstable
packages they need (gnome, enlightenment, apt...)  Is this a feature that
will be added soon, or is there some method of doing this now?

If this is something that somebody should start working on, where would
they start?  could it be done as some new scripts for apt's dselect 
method?

Two possible 'modes' of tracking unstable packages:

1) Track _only_ the packages from unstable of which they already have a
version installed.  - but then what to do if a package suddenly depends on
a package which is not being tracked?

2) Track everything in unstable, but only try to upgrade a package if 
 a) the user requests to have the package upgraded
 b) another package depends on the new version

thanks,
-brad