Re: [Synaptic-devel] 0.45pre1

[Panu Matilainen]

Quoting Michael Vogt <address@hidden>:

> Dear Friends,
> 
> 
> I worked on synaptic over the weekend and I have a new test-version :)
> 
> So if you have some spare time, please download and test it.
> 
> You can get it at:
> http://people.debian.org/~mvo/synaptic/testing/synaptic-0.45pre1.tar.gz
> 
> And this whats NEW:
>  - proxy can be configured with the gui now

Cool, but the tab should be called something other than "Cache" then, that's an
highly unobvious place to search for proxy settings :)


>  - basic support for release selection (if you have more than one
>    distro in your sources.list, you can choose which to use by
>    default)
> 
> If you help testing, please go for the stuff that changed. I would
> like to know from the rpm users, if there is something like "release
> selection" in apt-rpm? And if so, is it actually used?

Pinning and thus "release selection" exists and is fully functional in apt-rpm
too. It's not probably as widely used in rpm-land, at least currently (though
I've been educating people here and there how this stuff works so the situation
might be changing :) but for example www.fedora.us provides this functionality.

However there's no pre-defined "stable/testing/unstable" distribution concept in
rpm-based distros, other than www.fedora.us currently providing those (though
the names have somewhat different meaning there) for its packages. Even in
Debian those could be whatever arbitrary strings in the Archive section of
release files: they aren't hardcoded anywhere within apt and a given third party
repository could have any arbitrary string there. For example Ximian Desktop 2
could have "Archive: xd2" and then if you have Default-Release set to "stable"
you'd need to use apt-get -t xd2 install foo" to install something from the XD2
repository.

So.. you'd have to dig out the available archives from the policy engine and
construct a menu out of those instead of hardcoding stable/testing/unstable to
make this generally useful. I might be able to help with that in a few weeks
when I get to move back to my own apartment (living in temporary location
without much computer access because of water damage now) but in the meanwhile
it's probably best to just disable the setting for apt-rpm - only going to cause
confusion since it doesn't actually do anything.

-- 
    - Panu -