[maemo-developers] "Opt-in" betas in the Application Manager (was Re: Application Manager and Extras-devel: Dealing with unstable software)

[From: Ryan Abel]

On Jan 23, 2009, at 12:05 PM, Guillem Jover wrote:

>> Those issues aside, what can we do at an application level to improve
>> the user experience here? An opt-in system for Extras-devel updates
>> and installs might be useful (rather than offering the Extras-devel
>> version, the user has to request it specifically), visual cues to a
>> packages origin (color coding, a small icon) and notices might also
>> help ("this package is unstable software, and may contain many
>> significant bugs, are you sure you want to install it?"), or even  
>> some
>> sort of apt pinning system to ignore certain updates.
>
> And this is already solved in Debian, by just marking experimental as
> to not be used to automatically upgrade packages from there. Apt will
> pin it down to priority 1, while unstable has normally priority 500.
> The only needed thing is to add an “NotAutomatic: yes” field in the
> Release file for experimental.
>
> So, with this, one can select to upgrade to a specific version from
> experimental, but this needs to be explicit. Otherwise no other  
> package
> will be upgraded from there.


OK, this is good (yet again betraying my ignorance of proper  
Debian ;)), now, how should this be implement in the Application  
Manager?

(Related, I've filled http://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4081 for  
ignoring specific updates)

--
Ryan Abel
Maemo Community Council chair