> Joe Emenaker wrote: > > All in all, this usually takes about 5 minutes of my attention per machine > > per update. Also, since I always want my machines on the bleeding edge, I > > always want the latest of whatever's available. If I just pointed dselect > > and apt to "woody" instead of "unstable", then, in about a year, I "woody" > > wouldn't be the latest dist anymore. (I mean, that's the whole reason the > > "stable", "frozen", and "unstable" symlinks are there in the first place, > > no?) > > If you want the bleeding edge, keep it pointed to unstable. Frozen is for > people who want to lend Debian a hand by testing the upcoming release.
Problem is that unstable doesn't always have everything. From what I can tell, when a release is frozen, everything from "unstable" is moved to "frozen". From that point on, any new versions of packages are placed in the new "unstable". The thing to keep in mind here is that (at least with the last couple releases), "unstable" is *empty* right after a freeze. So, if you're telling dselect to keep up-to-date with "stable" and "unstable", then, right after a freeze, you'll suddenly see all of these "obsolete" packages... because all of the "unstable" packages that you've got installed have disappeared (having moved to "frozen").. and they'll remain obsolete until you either start including "frozen" in your updates or until the maintainer of each of those packages uploads a new version and it goes into "unstable". Now, when they freeze a release candidate, if they *copied* "unstable" to "frozen", then everyone would be happy. But that's not what they've done the last few times; they've moved them. So, unless dselect is watching "frozen" as well, it gets the rug pulled out from under it. - Joe
