Staging area for hardy-proposed ?

[Scott Kitterman]

On Wed, 4 Jun 2008 19:35:26 +0200 Michael Vogt <michael.vogt at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>On Wed, Jun 04, 2008 at 06:33:49PM +0200, Sebastien Bacher wrote:
>> Le mercredi 04 juin 2008 à 17:28 +0200, Michael Vogt a écrit :
>> > Hi,
>> > 
>> > I would like to discuss if we should have a staging area for
>> > hardy-proposed for updates that need to go in together at the same
>> > time.
>[..]
>> What would that bring us? Upgrades that breaks something else should use
>> some Breaks information to indicate that and the upgrade tools should
>> set correctly everything on hold until the situation is resolved no?
>> If that's not the case right no that's bugs in the tools and we should
>> look at fixing those rather no?
>
>Sorry that I haven't written my initial mail more clearly. I wanted to
>ask for discussion about the fact that sometimes stuff in
>hardy-proposed can not be upgraded because dependencies are missing
>(not build yet).
>
>I'm speficially having the example of openoffice.org in mind (just
>because its a complex package, not to pick on it).
>
>In hardy we have 2.4.0. In hardy-proposed we have
>2.4.1~rc2. Openoffice.org needs matching openoffice.org-l10n-en-gb (or
>other languages) packages. Those match the exact version of the
>openoffice.org they are build against (Depends: ooo (>= 2.4.0), ooo
>(<< 2.4.0.1)) and they come from a different source package than OOo.
>
>This means that even if they are uploaded at the same time there is a
>certain chance that they enter hardy-proposed at different times. This
>means that users on hardy see a upgrade in update-manager that he can
>not install (grayed out) because the dependencies are not available
>yet. No big deal, but a bit confusing. Depending on the situation the
>"partial upgrade" feature kicks in that may remove packages.
>
>For a user who upgrades at this time from gutsy to hardy with
>gutsy-proposed enabled the situation is different. The
>release-upgrader tries to upgrade everything and discovers that it
>needs to remove the openoffice.org-l10n-en-gb packages (or other
>langauges) in order to upgrade openoffice.org. It will stop the
>upgrade because it will refuse to remove translations by default. He
>gets a message that the upgrade can not be calculated.
>
>As a alternative we could simply make update-manager not use -proposed
>during release upgrades to workaround problem (2) and disable the
>"partial upgrades" feature in update-manager that kicks in when the
>apt resolver discovers that it needs to remove packages in order to
>calculate a upgrade. so that problems in part (1) go away.
>
>My feeling is that with automatic tools the manual overhead shouldn't
>be that big.
>
Is running with -proposed activated all the time a supported configuration?  I think -proposed is suitable for package testing, but a bit risky for everyday use.

Scott K