Hi all, [I'm not subscribed, please CC me if you want me to read your mail] As a result of me filing #632438 (asking for mechanisms to get popcon to exclude packages), I discovered that you can put options in the sources.list lines, but they aren't documented (#632441). That led to a brainstorm about a better sources.list format on #debian-devel. If you were to consider a newer more readable and flexible format, please start discussions on the debian-user and debian-devel lists to get more ideas. I mentioned that if the client-side automatic mirror selection stuff was to be added to apt, then a shakeup of the sources.list format might be in order, depending on how it is implemented. The first thing that came up was the format of the file itself. One developer disliked the single-line format and thought an ini or rfc822-like format would be better. Having to list deb and deb-src lines with almost the same content wasn't liked. Same for only being able to list one release/suite per entry. Someone else wanted to be able to express priority/pinning stuff in the sources.list. I also looked at how YUM does it, some interesting options there: http://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/yum/sn-yum-maintenance.html Here is an rfc822-like format of some example ideas for format and stuff that could be added to it: # Yay for the universal OS!! Label: Debian URL: http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ Suites: testing unstable Components: main contrib non-free Source: yes Architectures: amd64 i386 Popcon: no Keys: 6BE3C423 610B28B55CFCFE45EA1B563B3116BA5E9FFA69A3 Type: deb Enabled: yes Protect: yes Priority: 900 Prefer-Mirror: http://ftp.au.debian.org/debian/ # Some hypothetical future where we can install RPMs using apt Label: RHEL URL: http://security.redhat.com/ Releases: rhel6 Components: main Source: no Type: rpm Enabled: no -- bye, pabs http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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