Saturday 4 May 2024

Re: Make proposed available by default? [was: Setting NotAutomatic for hirsute+1-proposed]

On Sat, May 04, 2024 at 02:08:16AM +0000, Seth Arnold wrote:
> But, I also expect very few of our users would use -proposed. What
> percentage do you expect? I'm guessing less than 1%.

I agree. But making it easier to test proposed for that tiny percentage
of users would benefit all users[1] in terms of the quality of SRUs that
they receive. Although this assumes that this change would actually be
effective in increasing proposed testing. If this were the case, then
users who do not use -proposed would still benefit from some regression
that was prevented from hitting -updates, at the cost of the increased
"apt update" downloads.

So perhaps the proportion of users who use -proposed isn't quite the
right thing to measure.

Again, to be clear I'm still on the fence!

> Instead of configuring proposed by default, I suggest that we should
> make this work:
>
> $ sudo add-apt-repository proposed
> Unable to handle repository shortcut 'proposed'

I'd be fine with this, but note that we have "add-apt-repository -p
proposed" (although temporarily broken for Noble due to LP: #2061128) so
we're not too far off.

> The wiki instructions for using proposed is pretty rough. If it were just
> one command I think it'd be a lot easier to encourage our users to provide
> feedback on pre-production packages.

Agreed - that's also mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

Robie

[1] Those that consume from -updates, anyway, which I think is near
enough everyone.