G'day Joey, I'm not subscribed to debian-devel, but wanted to add some comments on this issue after reading the web archives. Because I'm not subscribed, I dunno if my Cc to the list will work, in which case you can forward this to the list as you see fit.
IMHO, the entire reason Helix exists as a seperate apt'able source is because debian doesn't have package-pools and "testing" distribution(s) yet. Untill it does, people like me will only be hurt by moving the helix packages into unstable. Helix is too stable for unstable, and too unstable for stable. As an end user, I use stable because I want stability. However, I also want almost-bleeding-edge of primarily destop stuff (Gnome) because what exists in stable is pretty weak, and all the useful stuff in that area is rapidly developing. I use dselect and apt-get to do my installations and upgrades. If I stick purely with debian, to get the good Gnome stuff I need to add unstable to my sources.list. This means I need to either do a full unstable upgrade, or manualy pick and choose, package by package, what I want upgraded to unstable and what I want to hold back. In the first option, I end up with unstable everything, busting basic system stuff that I can't afford to bust. With the second option, I have the major headache of tracking stable _and_ updating manualy selected parts from unstable, editing sources.list and changing selections each time. By putting debian stable and helix in my sources.list, I get the best of both worlds in a headache free apt-get cronjob; a stable base with the latest-almost-stable desktop. Helix have done a damn good job of making their packages fit nicely onto my stable potato desktop machine. I believe the infamous "aalib" affair actualy came out of a wishlist bugreport submitted to them by a user; the then frozen potato aalib was too low a version to meet all the helix dependencies. This meant people like me had to pull aalib from unstable before I could install helix. By putting an updated aalib into helix, debian potato users could apt-get helix without that small hickup. It sounds like Helix made their own package rather than grab the one from unstable... probably an un-necisary mistake. Dunno why they did that, maybe so all the helix packages had a "helix" version number for consistancy? People like me need the helix distribution... as a way of conveniently upgrading our "desktop" packages to a "testing" rather than "unstable" state, while keeping the rest of our system to "stable". Package pools would be the easiest way to roll helix into the formal debian distribution and still retain the benefits of treating it like a sepearate apt'able source. A "testing" distribution would certainly be a step in the right direction, but maybe "testing-desktop", "testing-webapps", "testing-..." would be better. Just a few ideas, but these can't happen without package-pools. Migrating to package pools can happen right now... just create the pool area and put any new packages in there that come and simlink to them in unstable. A testing distribution can happen as simlinks to stable, unstable, and pkgpool. As packages get updated, they migrate into the pool area. By the time we release woody, we'll be fully pkg-pooled with no extra load on mirrors. Just my 2c, probably already fully discussed by now :-) -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ABO: finger [EMAIL PROTECTED] for more info, including pgp key ---------------------------------------------------------------------- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]