Apt repository interoperability (was: Bug#311188: Debian edu messed up my Ubuntu system.)

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Sun, Apr 20, 2008 at 03:09:38PM +0200, Herman Robak wrote:
>   Apt is an awesome package manager framework.  It has a lot of power!
> But it is a powertool with few safety features aimed at Joe Average.
> I don't think we want to advertise loudly the lack of such safety
> features.  But unless we do, I think it is the duty of Debian and its
> derivatives to improve the safety nets.
> 
>   Before anyone suggests more onerous warning dialogs telling the users
> that they are on their own (more washing of hands) I would like to
> propose "upstream" as a metadata item for apt.  debian-multimedia.org
> would have a debian.org apt source as it's upstream, for example.
> Basically, apt sources could declare binary interoperability with
> other apt sources.  Any thoughts?

Because quite a few different distributions use APT and .deb repositories,
and their packages aren't necessarily interchangeable, it would be useful if
APT knew which distribution you were running and checked this against the
Release file in the repository.  This would make it possible to display a
warning or otherwise behave intelligently.

This idea has been around for a while.  There is real work associated with
doing this, however, and it hasn't yet been a big enough priority for anyone
with the necessary time and skills.

-- 
 - mdz