Re: The Gordian Knot (was Re: Negative Summary of the Split Proposal)

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

    Which is why I said a couple of days ago that I thought you missed the
    significance of apt.

I know that apt is significant, but I don't know precisely what
significance it has, and precisely how much.  That depends on a lot of
details.  I have only the fragmentary information which has come out
in this discussion, plus a little more I obtained on the side.

Sometimes the fragments of information seem to conflict.

Early in this discussion, I was told that most users would not edit
the apt configuration file by hand.  That seemed plausible--it is
true for most other system configuration files.

But today or yesterday someone told me that the only way to select a
mirror site is to edit the apt configuration file by hand.  If that's
the case, lots and lots of users are going to edit the file to do
that.

What's the real situation here?

If it is true that one currently needs to edit the apt configuration
file to specify a mirror site, that could be changed technically.

Could people add a "specify a mirror site" feature to apt,
so that users won't have to edit the configuration file for this?
It seems like a convenient feature for the users anyway.