Should we enable proposed by default (with lower Pin-Priority)?

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Stable release updates aren’t always super easy to test for reporters and sometimes users are requested to enable the whole -proposed repositories to test a single package, leaving them in a dangerous situation, as they may update other stuff that they are not meant to test.

So, in my opinion we should ship by default a /etc/apt/preferences.d/proposed-updates allowing selective update.

Such packages could be easily tested now with something like apt install foo/release-proposed without having the user to toggle check-boxes that may lead to higher system instability.

A part from the terminal usage (that imho isn’t a big deal and can be fixed by a tuned update-manager), one other drawback is that when a package to be tested is composed of multiple inter-dependent packages, where the command would be something like apt install foo/release-proposed libfoo-1/release-proposed ....

So maybe we could provide a command line tool (ubuntu-proposed-install ?) that can handle this easier, so that will only upgrade from proposed the packages from the same source that have been previously installed.

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2

This sounds like a great idea to me. I have always found dealing with proposed to be overwhelming, so now I usually end up manually downloading and installing the Deb packages instead.

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Hmm, do you plan on making these changes to APT upstream? (these seem like some pretty major changes to APT)

Just a suggestion:

I think it would be better if this was made generic for all the components (and APT repos), instead of just being for the proposed component. Something along the lines of apt-get install -y gedit/ubuntu/unstable

These changes could probably be made to APT itself too, similar to the above syntax.

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4

No, apt already supports this.

What it doesn’t support is to also upgrade depending packages from the same pocket, but that could be handled differently I think.

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5

oh, I wasn’t aware of that

yep, I think that could be added to APT

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