[maemo-developers] Application Manager and Extras-devel: Dealing with unstable software

[From: Mike Lococo]

>> what can we do to protect users from the full fury of Extras-devel
>> while still giving them reasonable access to some of the stabler
>> applications in the repository?
> 
> Another ugly trick would be to have dynamic repositories.

There be dragons, similarly with a package "whitelist" for extras devel.
  By adding another layer of abstraction which is outside of the user's
control you're asking for additional confusion when a package that
someone wants is "masked out" by some other package's whitelist/dynamic
repo function.

If we really want to do this "right", look at how Smart Package Manager
[1] handles multiple repositories.  It uses a combination of:

- Repository labeling while browsing for packages, so that when you're
looking at a package you might want to install, you know where it's
coming from.
- Repository preference weights to ensure that packages are always
preferred from your stable core repository, even if newer packages are
available from less preferred repos.
- Package by package preference weights, to ensure that you can resolve
any corner cases that arise in repository preferences.
- Package pinning, so you can just lock something down from changing if
you've got a stable combo for a tricky set of packages.

Because App Manager currently deals with a small number of packages
(compared to most of the desktop distros, anyway), I think we could get
away with simply labeling the repository source in the various package
views (but especially the upgrade view) and simply leveraging App
Manager's existing capability to upgrade packages one at a time to allow
users to pick and choose which ones they want.  The Alpha/Beta color
scheme could add additional context as to how stable users should expect
a package to be, as long as the debtags were compatible with upstream.

Thanks,
Mike Lococo

[1] http://labix.org/smart