[Aptitude-devel] Congratulations on a major release and some queries -

[shirish शिरीष]

Dear Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo and all and any existing as well as
previous aptitude maintainers,

Congratulations and kudos for a new major release. I did have a brief
look at the changes mentioned in changelog.Debian.gz as well as
/usr/share/aptitude/news and mostly the changes seem to be about being
conservative and keeping packages in (in respect of solutions shown to
users) rather than destructive ones. These I probably suspect are to
when packages are in the transitions phase
https://release.debian.org/transitions/ in unstable or/and testing as
well as when upgrading from one stable release to the other (the big
ones).

Any solution which doesn't scare users into thinking they might end in
an unusable desktop state at all times and especially when they try
doing dist-upgrade is very welcome :) I suspect that is where you went
through this, am I right ?

I am curious about some of the things though. For instance why is news
at /usr/share/aptitude/news rather than
/usr/share/doc/aptitude/NEWS.Debian.gz . I did see that
/usr/share/doc/aptitude/NEWS is also present which is symlinked to
/usr/share/aptitude/news but don't understand the reasons for having
both. There should either be /usr/share/doc/aptitude/NEWS or
/usr/share/doc/aptitude/NEWS.Debian.gz . Just having both confuses
users and more so when NEWS.Debian.gz just has information on a single
release.  Don't understand the need for that seperate NEWS.Debian.gz
unless you want to highlight the breakage that happened in the 0.6.1
release for all time.

I haven't been able to quite understand the changes you have made with
re-installation and have never been sure how it actually works.

For instance. here are two versions of the mpv package in the repo.

[$] apt-cache policy mpv

mpv:
  Installed: 0.14.0-1+b2
  Candidate: 0.14.0-1+b2
  Version table:
 *** 0.14.0-1+b2 100
          1 http://httpredir.debian.org/debian unstable/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     0.14.0-1+b1 600
        600 http://httpredir.debian.org/debian testing/main amd64 Packages

Now from what little I know, I cannot do

sudo aptitude reinstall mpv=0.14.0-1+b2 at least this was not allowed
or aptitude disregarded version information and more often than not
would install packages from testing (as I have a testing base rather
than unstable.)  Could you elaborate on that ?

Lastly, and it has nothing to do with apt (and aptitude), actually it
does but in a round-about way, could you look at #80123 although I
suspect you already know that bug-report as you too would have been
hit by downloading a big package upgrade and knowing that a severe bug
is with that specific release and found yourself to be a little
annoyed by not having that information before download commences.

Look forward to hearing your responses on the above.

-- 
          Regards,
          Shirish Agarwal  शिरीष अग्रवाल
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