RFC: Putting a "compatible" flag into the Control file and using it

Holger Freyther zecke at openmoko.org
Sun Aug 3 13:11:27 CEST 2008


Hey Tick, Rob,

I see constant breakage with people attempting an upgrade from 
org.openmoko.dev to org.openmoko.asu.stable. While such an upgrade might 
work, it might completely fail and break things. In my Opie past I even saw 
people "upgrading" to an eight year old Qtopia snapshot and messing up their 
system badly.

I would propose the following and then do the patches:
	- Add "Compatible-Distribution" to the Control file and Packages index
	- Opkg gets an option for compatible distributions in "opkg.conf"
	- Opkg will only see packages from compatible distributions (on update)
	- Opkg will only install packages from compatible distributions
	- Opkg will ignore both on -force-any-distribution
	- Make the compatible distribution default

Reasoning:
	I have seen a lot of breakage with such "upgrades" and even if it is obvious 
for us that this feed should not be used or might not be compatible, for many 
non developers they look perfectly fine. People knowing that asu.stable is 
compatible with a certain version of Poky or Angstrom, or want to install a 
debian package can use the -force-any-distribution to get their packages 
installed.

comments?

z.
 




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