[PureOS] Bits frm PureOS | Buster edition

[Matthias Klumpp]

Am Do., 11. Juli 2019 um 22:01 Uhr schrieb Jeremiah C. Foster
<jeremiah.foster at puri.sm>:
>
> On Wed, 2019-07-10 at 22:28 +0200, Matthias Klumpp wrote:
> > [...]
> >
> > It has, but if green is frozen our users won't get any of the
> > updates.
> > All of our users will have the "green" suite only in their
> > sources.list currently, but that will be frozen and not receive any
> > more updates, just like the buster suite is frozen in Debian now.
>
> I see. I thought that Debian stable releases were still rolling, but I
> think I'm mistaken. What really happens is that security fixes and
> updates get "backported" into stable from testing / unstable?
>
> > Instead, a green-updates and maybe green-security suite needs to be
> > created and added to the user's sources.list if they still want to
> > receive updates. This is a manual step, and if our users don't know
> > about it, they won't receive any updates.
>
> Okay. This makes it a lot clearer to me. I naively thought it happened
> automagically.

Unfortunately not, this all needs to be done manually in dak, and
somehow applied to the user's machines.

> > There are solutions to this:
> >
> > A) Merge updates into the "green" suite.
> > This is not really supported in Laniakea (because it's usually a bad
> > idea ^^) and will result in us being unable to stop distribution of
> > an
> > update once it's released, require users to do bigger metadata
> > downloads on archive updates, not allow for much access control
> > during
> > updates and will make it hard for users to opt-out receiving certain
> > updates. I don't actually know any distribution that does this.
> >
> > B) Implement some hack in a package that every "green" users installs
> > (apt?) to rewrite sources.list
> > That's also ugly but ensures every sources.list is changed - if the
> > script is written well and doesn't have sideeffects.
>
> I'd like to know more about this approach, what does it entail? Would
> we;
>
> 1. Create green-updates and green-security
> 2. Find a way to get all green users to put it in their
> /etc/apt/sources.d/ dir?

Yes. But we would likely need to rewrite their /etc/apt/sources.list,
as these suites are commonly located there and if we put snippets into
sources.list.d, future documentation may be more confusing to people.
Doing this automatically is possible, but ugly. Getting *all* our
users to know about it to do that themselves is something I am not
sure is possible (and if they don't know, they will be out of security
support).

> Perhaps we could do both a simple script and to print clear
> instructions in our forum on how to do this.
>
> > C) Keep "green" as rolling development target, create new suite with
> > the released, stable packages and switch PureOS deployment over to
> > that for new Librems
>
> Wouldn't it be easier to keep the new suite as 'green'? That way we
> would have fewer changes to apt sources lists.

With this solution we wouldn't need any changes to the sources.list.
People who want the rolling development target just stay on green, no
changes necessary. People who want the stable distro modify their
sources.list to switch to that. And people who get a new Librem will
have the new "stable" falvour of PureOS installed by default.

> > We'd need a new suite name,
>
> Another color? :-)

If we are a bit liberal with those, we could use names like
https://graf1x.com/list-of-colors-with-color-names/
It would be neat to have codenames alphabetically sortable (so start
with PureOS 8 "Amber", followe by PureOS 9 "Byzantine", etc.)

> > [...]

Cheers,
    Matthias