Disabling/Enabling repositories, a stronger negative pin
Hi folks,
as some of you are aware from IRC I'm looking into ways to be able to
disable repositories, similar to a -1 pin, but with the difference
that it cannot be overriden on the command-line or in preferences
files. Posting this on ML now to get some more feedback, as feedback
on IRC was rather limited.
This provides the ability for tools to disable specific repositories
at runtime. For example, unattended-upgrades wants to disable all
non-security updates.
I started with https://salsa.debian.org/apt-team/apt/merge_requests/40/diffs,
but I'm not entirely happy with the result. APT can in some cases,
still consider them valid sources for download, for example, which
I don't really want - a disabled repository should behave like a NotSource
one (that is, like /var/lib/dpkg/status, in that trying to download from
it fails). Also, -32768 is kind of magic. We could use a keyword here, such
as "never", "reject", "ignore".
Another thing I'm not so happy about is that I'd like repositories
to be able to declare themselves as disabled, and then allow overriding
this in preferences. This would allow distributions to ship auxiliary
repositories for which information is downloaded, but that are disabled
by default. For example, you could enable backports-type repos by default
and then show the users available newer versions in there with an apt
json hook.
Another idea I played with is introducing an "Override" field for
pins, that can override previous pins. I think this, together with
a default flag in Release files for pinning to the magic value of
-32768, would allow us to achieve both things.
--
debian developer - deb.li/jak | jak-linux.org - free software dev
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