[maemo-developers] "Opt-in" betas in the Application Manager

[From: Marius Vollmer]

ext Andrew Flegg <andrew at bleb.org> writes:

> 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.

I expect this to "just work", modulo bugs.  (The package domain checking
has been implemented by hooking into the policy machinery, and I might
have broken it while doing that.)

> 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.

I don't think so.  Libapt-pkg decides on a single candidate version for
each package, using the policy machinery etc, and the Application
manager just shows this version.


However, Debian experimental is not Debian unstable, and I have the
feeling that Maemo extras-devel can't really decide for itself whether
it wants to be more like Debian experimental or more like Debian
unstable.

Extras-devel is used both for smoke testing of new 'point-releases'
before they are unleashed onto the masses and also for beta releases
that will never go to the masses and should only be installed by people
who know what they are getting themselves into.

So, disabling automatic upgrades from extras-devel will make smoke
testing less effective.