-proposed and NotAutomatic ButAutomaticUpgrades

[Iain Lane]

Greetings,

I argued for this at UDS, but we didn't come to a conclusion. I'd like
to raise this topic again so that we can see whether it is wanted it or
not.

I'd like to enable NotAutomatic ButAutomaticUpgrades (as for -backports)
for the -proposed pocket pre-release (FROZEN or DEVELOPMENT). The effect
that this would have would be that users with devel_release-proposed
enabled would not be automatically offered upgrades to packages in
-proposed. They would still be able to explicitly opt-in on a
per-package basis (apt-get install foo/quantal-proposed, for example),
or to opt-in for everything by fiddling with package pins.

We've already reiterated many times that -proposed pre-release is not
supposed to be something that users (even developers) are supposed to be
using. It's a staging area for packages, mainly to avoid skew and to
keep the development release (the release pocket) working and
installable as far as possible. Thus it seems to me that there is little
point in imposing the additional irritation of dealing with archive
problems on users of the development release when we don't think they
should be using it anyway.

You could say that people have opted in to the -proposed experience by
enabling it in their sources list, but what we'd be giving them in the
development release is very different to what -proposed is used for in
stable releases, so I don't think it necessarily makes sense to say that
opting in to stable -proposed implies that you'd want the other.

Another option would be to have the release upgrader disable -proposed
when upgrading to a development release, but that isn't very
satisfactory since people with it enabled probably would want it back
when the release goes stable, and they'd not even have the option of
cherry-picking packages without having to go and manually enable it
again.

It was really quite simple to extend Launchpad for this. I've got a
branch (not pushed anywhere) that does this, and will submit it to
Launchpad upstream if there is consensus that this would be desirable.
(In fact it's protected by a feature flag so it wouldn't be harmful to
push this now, but would be rather pointless if Ubuntu doesn't want it)

Cheers,

-- 
Iain Lane                                  [ iain at orangesquash.org.uk ]
Debian Developer                                   [ laney at debian.org ]
Ubuntu Developer                                   [ laney at ubuntu.com ]
PhD student                                       [ ial at cs.nott.ac.uk ]
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