Re: Eliminating upgrade confusion

[Curt Howland <Howland@priss.com>]

Paul E Condon <pecondon@mesanetworks.net> wrote:
> It is a good way for a lot of people, but maybe not for
> newbies who think they can create a better way through the exercise 
> of pure rhetoric without benefit of experience.

Having been using Debian since 1995, I consider myself to have some 
benefit of experience.

One of the first things I do in any Debian installation is to 
edit /etc/apt/sources.list and change "stable" to whatever the name 
of the release is. Exactly what David Jardine suggested be the 
default.

I do it for exactly the same reason he stated. Because "stable" 
doesn't always point to the same archive.

With the run-up to the Sarge release, I've seen many people who are 
using "testing" what to do. Invariably, the suggestion is to change 
their sources.list from "testing" to Sarge to avoid confusion. All 
Mr. Jardine did was suggest this as the default, and for that he gets 
flamed.

I agree with Mr. Jardine, an upgrade should be a deliberate act. Since 
the installer is revamped with every "release", it is a simple thing 
to change the texts from "stable" to the name of the release.

I will file a "wish list" bug on it, suggesting the change.

Curt-






-- 
September 11th, 2001
The proudest day for gun control and central 
planning advocates in American history