Hi, I've just started to do research in order to write a tool which I was always missing. What I have so far is just a brief "background" information, explaining the problem - see below.
I thought it might be good to ask here if I'm not trying to reinvent something that already exists. Or maybe someone has some ideas about this issue? | Background | ---------- | | Maintaining Debian stable systems sometimes requires installation of | unofficial versions of packages: | | - backporting newer versions, when significant new functionality is | required on the system but unavailable in the official version found | in the current stable release. In this case, the version string | usually sorts as newer than the official stable version string. This | means that pinning is not necessary, as apt will upgrade such package | by default. | | - making local changes to the official version. In this case, the most | reliable way is to make the version string sort as older than the | official one (using the "tilde" feature of dpkg) and force | installation of such package using pinning. (The other strategy: | trying to invent a version string newer than the current one, but | older than the next one is difficult to do reliably.) | | In both cases, there is one major drawback: apt will not warn you where | newer versions of official packages (point releases, security updates) | will appear in the stable release. This means you may miss some | important change. | | The point of this document is to design a utility whose job is to do | exactly this: let you track newer official versions of locally overriden | packages. | -- Marcin Owsiany <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://marcin.owsiany.pl/ GnuPG: 1024D/60F41216 FE67 DA2D 0ACA FC5E 3F75 D6F6 3A0D 8AA0 60F4 1216 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
