[Linux-disciples] Upgrading only after a week

[Adam Kessel]

On Sun, Oct 05, 2003 at 04:23:55PM -0400, Stephen R Laniel wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 05, 2003 at 01:20:25PM -0700, Adam Kessel wrote:
> > I think the only way to do it as to do apt-get update, then wait a week,
> > then do apt-get upgrade.
> Too bad. I mean, I guess this is easy enough with a cron job (you'd just
> have the cron job run upgrade and then update once a week, right?), but

Upgrading with a cron job is generally a bad idea. There are often
important questions you need to answer in the upgrade process; and also
you won't get to see the output from apt-listbugs.

> it would be cool if you could establish more fine-grained policies
> through some kind of .aptrc - say, only accepting upgrades to Apache that
> are more than a month old, but accepting galeon upgrades immediately.

That's exactly what pinning does. Packages move from unstable into
testing after 10 days with no upgrades (or shorter periods if the urgency
of the upgrade is higher) (and if their dependencies are also in testing
with no conflicts).  So you could have both unstable and testing in your
apt sources, and pin particular packages to testing and others to
unstable (usually the way it works is to have one be your default and
then give preferences to certain packages from the other).

See apt_preferences(5) under "TRACKING TESTING OR UNSTABLE".
-- 
Adam Kessel
http://bostoncoop.net/adam