Colin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > David Jardine wrote: > > On Thu, Jun 09, 2005 at 08:12:27PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote: > >>>Somebody who was running stable didn't want woody to be replaced > >>>by sarge without his being asked. Somebody running testing didn't > >>>want to move from sarge to etch automatically. (Sid seems to be > >> > >>No, you are describing people who are running woody and sarge and should > >>have those in their sources.list. > > > > Exactly. But do we realise, as beginners, what the implications > > are of putting "stable" or "testing" in sources.list? If we > > didn't know we could use these words (or if we knew we couldn't), > > we wouldn't. But we do and we get ourselves into a mess. I think > > Nah, I can't buy this argument. When I look to see what entries I can put > in my sources.list file, I actually take a web browser and look at the > directory it comes from. In the "dists" directory, I can see that > "testing" and "stable" are links to names like "sarge" and "etch". It > doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that links like testing and
I think you over-estimate what less than a rocket scientist is capable of. Frankly, I've been astounded to see posts from people who were surprised when sarge went stable, and all of a sudden (?!?) they're confronted with the possibility of dl'ing hundreds of updates (over dialup). One way to look at it is, "Where the hell have you been?!?" Another is, "SNAFU." MANY (lusers) don't keep up with things we consider pedestrian information. The question is, do we care about them? How much hand-holding should Debian do? Well, Debian traditionally leans toward hand-holding (or "do the least harm"). I kinda, sorta, almost, like the idea of forcing users to define their chosen distribution (potato, woody, sarge, etch) in their /etc/apt/apt.conf ... As long as that doesn't fsck up people like Joey who know what they're doing. If I had hundreds of machines whose /etc/apt/apt.conf I had to edit by hand, this would suck (even if I could mass scp an apt.conf to all of them in one command line). fwiw. -- Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. (*) http://www.spots.ab.ca/~keeling Linux Counter #80292 - - http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt Spammers! http://www.spots.ab.ca/~keeling/autospam.html -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
