Re: Latest document..

[bruce@va.debian.org]

Ian Jackson commented to me the other day that he made a mistake in
keeping "pending" selections and the actual package state in the same
file. Today he would have put them in separate files, so that the actual
package state would be modified only by dpkg (or some other back-end) and
the changes you want made to the package state when dpkg runs would be in
another, probably smaller, file.

It makes sense from a modularity standpoint, but I'm not sure how important
it is now considering that Ian is putting zero work into dpkg. Part of this
may simply be that he doesn't trust other people's code to muck around with
his package system :-)

Can't you use "ls" to do an if-modified-since query for FTP? Never mind that
the "ls" format used by FTP is unspecified, it is going to work 99% of the
time, with the remaining 1% being DJB's silly FTP server which should not be
used for a Debian archive. I don't see how it would be any more or less
accurate than IMS via HTTP.

I don't think it makes much difference to your design, but we should not be
100% deb-centric. For RPMs and POSIX packages I am hoping we can translate
headers to make them look like the .deb ones to Deity.

	Thanks

	Bruce