Re: [Synaptic-devel] Distribution selection

[Michael Vogt]

On Tue, Sep 30, 2003 at 10:42:52AM +0300, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> Quoting Sebastian heinlein <address@hidden>:
[..]
> > I was wrong on this. I haven't considered that this is actually apt
> > pining.
> 
> Exactly. We should pay some careful attention - here's a chance to get an
> understandable GUI presesntation/configuration of apt pinning which by 
> fiddling
> with apt preferences file and looking at apt-cache policy output (did it
> understand what I did) is anything but nice.

Yes, I think so as well. There are some problems inside libapt that
makes this a bit clumsy sometimes (libapt is not really designed for
interactive use). We have a function in the policy engine of apt to
create a pin, but not to remove it (which is importend if we want to
chage the default release without rereading the whole cache). I'll ask
on the debian-deity ML and Gustaco and see if we can get something
like this. 

I know that the "release" scheme is more flexible than just having
"stable/testing/unstable" :) My problem was that I wanted to see if it
works and I have no idea right now how I can make libapt to tell me
what releases are available (and what origions, that might be nice as
well). Do you have any idea Panu? Or maybe Gustavo? 

> The way I see it, there are two basic cases:
> 1) user wants to install/upgrade something from non-default distro *now*
> 2) user wants to follow something from non-default release constantly
> 
> It'd be nice if there was a distro-selection menu (see my other post, the
> possible distro values aren't tied to stable/testing/unstable at all) hidden 
> in
> advanced tab per package to enable permanent pinning for a given package, and 
> a
> global preference like there is now. That takes care of 2) but how to make 1)
> easy and obvious .. well, dunno.

I thnk #2 is not easy. We might add a "advanced" tab or something like
this to the main information notebook. And we have the idea of
Sebastian to add a radio button group. I'm uncertain what way to
go. #1 would be enough IMHO when it would be possible to change the
default distro without rereading the cache.

bye,
 Michael