On Fri, Sep 02, 2005 at 02:48:33PM -0600, Paul E Condon wrote:
>
> I have just run a test of the use of 'sarge' in apt.conf.
> On my machine, currently running sarge/stable, the statement
> APT::DefaultRelease "sarge"
> has no effect. Aptitude still goes for the highest version
> number, which happens to be "etch" in 402 cases. I conclude
> that one should not use release code names in apt.conf.
>
> I have previously noted that one should not use release code
> names in apt/preferences. So:
>
> "Don't use release code names in configuring the apt system."
>
> seems to me to be a good general rule.
>
> As a comment to those who have used code names and think they
> work: They work only if you have only one release in your sources.list,
> and then they don't really work, they just don't matter because
> there is never a choise of release to be made.
>
> Personally, I was rather disappointed when I first made this discovery
> in apt/preferences. I thought I had figured out a neat lazy-man's way
> to handle the transitions from one stable release to the next. But I
> won't describe it because I have established that it doesn't work.
>
Paul, I think you were one of those (forgive me if I'm wrong) who
shot me down a couple of months ago for suggesting that such words
as "stable", "testing" and "unstable" might better be reserved as
purely descriptive words for real things like "sarge" or "etch".
I confess my vast ignorance of how all the developers, release
managers, etc do their work on debian, but isn't the whole point of
the operation to provide us, as users, with a system that is as
easy as possible to use (without MS-type dumbing down, of course)?
When we start with debian, we learn about "stable", "testing", etc
(by the way, what's the correct word for these things? Are they
different releases? distributions? flavours? versions? ...?). We
decide what sort of life we want to lead and pick the appropriate
thing ("woody", sarge", "etch"...). When a new thingummy becomes
the official stable and the others move up, we take advice (from
this list, probably) about when to dist-upgrade. We're in control
of our system and know that a word like "stable" is not suddenly
going to point to something quite different.
You say you were "disappointed" that you couldn't base things on
the code names. Well, yes, aren't we all?
Right, back to the air-raid shelter...
--
David Jardine
"Running Debian GNU/Linux and
loving every minute of it." -L. von Sacher-M.(1835-1895)
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