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

[From: Andrew Flegg]

On Sat, Feb 7, 2009 at 6:17 AM, Ryan Abel <rabelg5 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jan 23, 2009, at 12:05 PM, Guillem Jover wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> OK, this is good (yet again betraying my ignorance of proper
> Debian ;)), now, how should this be implement in the Application
> Manager?

Assuming the version of apt in Maemo supports "NotAutomatic: yes" -
and that App Mgr leaves all the available upgrade decisions to apt (I
can't remember having looked at that bit of code yet, I *think* it
does), it should just be a case of adding the "NotAutomatic: yes" to:

    http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel/dists/diablo/Release

I'm not sure if this alone results in apt pinning it at 1, or whether
we'll therefore need another trick (a default  /etc/apt/preferences
would do) to reduce it's priority.

There'll also need to be some testing to see what happens in the App
Mgr's package view when there are two versions available to install,
and the lower priority version is higher. It might make assumptions
which override apt.

Cheers,

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew at bleb.org  |  http://www.bleb.org/
Maemo Community Council member