Question about apt, apt-proxy, Sarge and testing

[Paul E Condon <pecondon@mesanetworks.net>]

I have a setup in which one of my Debian computers maintains an apt-proxy,
and all the computers on my LAN, point their apt_sources.list to that proxy.
I am running Sarge on all the computers. It has worked very nicely, but I
notice something that I don't like, and I don't know how to fix, or even
if it is possible to fix:

In the past, I have used "sarge" and "testing" interchangeably. That is
sometimes I set up a source.list to get stuff from sarge, and sometimes
from testing. This happened because long ago, the computers were all on
woody, and the transition to sarge was gradual. 

Now I notice that my system does not recognize that sarge and testing are
really the same thing. On a single computer, apt, dpkg, etc. seem to believe
that some packages are from sarge and some from testing, and that these are
not the same. If I remove change one to the other in a sources.list, they
want to download a bunch of stuff that is really up to date. (I talk about
this as being a problem in apt, dpkg, but it might be a problem in apt-proxy.
I really don't understand where the misbehavior actually happens.)

While thinking about how to fix the problem, I realize that I can't see
why these programs should be aware of the fact that sarge and testing are
the same. So maybe this is a 'feature' of the package system that is not
subject to fixing. But is there some way to fix it?

Why fix it? I had been expecting to stick with sarge for a while after it
becomes the new 'stable'. I thought that would be easy: Just point my
sources.list to 'sarge' now, and don't worry. But... if a remove the
lines specifying 'testing', the system wants to download and install all
the same stuff again. I call this not a smooth transition. 

Any ideas? 


-- 
Paul E Condon           
pecondon@mesanetworks.net