On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 10:44 AM, Martin Pitt <mpitt@debian.org> wrote:
> Christoph Berg [2013-02-14 10:29 +0100]:
>> I see the point. The behavior is in line with backport.debian.org's
>> "principle of least surprise", i.e. you will only get upgraded to
>> these packages if you explicitely ask for it. For Ubuntu PPA users the
>> expectation might be the other way round ("I configured the repo, so
>> please take over my system") - I'm not sure which way is the better
>> one to default to.
>
> Debian/Ubuntu backports potentially affect the whole system, so almost
> every user will only want to pick a package or two, not all of them.
> Also, the point of those "NotAutomatic" flag was that you can even add
> the apt source by default everywhere.
>
> Most PPAs, as well as apt.pg.org are "topic" repositories which IMHO you
> would usually enable because you want to use them.
+1 for this. Or, +100 if I'm allowed ;)
As I argued when we set this up, I think this is the 99% use-case. We
should default to this. It's always possible to change it for the
less-common usecase. I dropped the argument because I think it was
much more important to get *anything* out there than to get stuck on
this, and because I was told it was a but too non-debian:y. But if you
are also in agreement, maybe this is something that can be reopened
for discussion?
I see two ways of doing this:
1) Just change the defaults per your suggestion above. This would
remove one step of the installation process completely. You're still
going to need to add the key manually per that.
2) Create a DEB package that works the same way as the RPM "repository
package". That means I download and install one DEB, and it sets up my
repository for me. It adds the line to apt.sources.d and it adds the
key. If we do this, it could potentially just set the pinning for us,
and the *repository* could still have the old defaults. The bottom
line is that the user would get what 99% of them want by default and
in a single step (actually, it would be two steps since DEB can't
install directly from http urls, but it would still be a huge
improvement - and it would work transparently if someone used a GUI
and just clicked the link).
What I would personally most like to see is the combination of these -
change the repository default to using "our packages" with priority,
*and* create a DEB wrapper package that sets it up for us
automatically.
--
Magnus Hagander
Me: http://www.hagander.net/
Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/
