Debian Packages
Every now and again I look over server logs and see people downloading random .deb packages from my mirrors, or from my servers, via wget or Firefox (rather than with apt-get/aptitude).
Personally I don't often download random binaries even from people I believe I can trust. Instead I'll download source and rebuild.
But it bugs me that somebody might download a work-in-progress, decide it isn't complete or otherwise good enough, and miss out on an update of awesome-sauce a day or two later.
I suspect there is no real solution to this "problem", and that including /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ entries inside a binary package to "force" an upgrade behind the scenes is a little too evil to tolerate. And yet .. something something dark-side .. something something seductive something?
Blog Update
This is my last film-subject entry. In the future I will have more accurate subjects, albeit more dull ones.
I still amuse myself with quotations, and before that the song lyrics, but I guess that now is a good time to call it a day with that.
ObFilm: Cruel Intentions
How did I never realize that the blog subjects were related to the Ob*: at the bottom after reading your blog for more than two years! Now that I know, I feel sad it's coming to an end :(
I quite like the idea that an app installs (optionally) an entry in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/. In fact I'd much rather that than the way some apps work going off to the upstream server to get updates. I'd say the sources.list.d way is a nice balance between 'no updates' and 'updates in a form I can't easily undo'.
WRT Debian packages: I'm seeing the same for packages I build for various reasons and have on my server. But I'm rather confident those who download know what they're a doing as I always make it pretty clearly on the page listing the available files, that one shouldn't download/install binary packages from me and rather take the source package and verify what I'm doing. Maybe you can add the same to your download pages. Though that doesn't keep people from downloading via deeplinks and thereby not reading the warning. But then those are doomed already and would probably download the binary in any case.
WRT film quotes: oh please, if you could come up with a few more, please keep them coming, I always loved guessing which film the quote was from (and to my surprise I guessed quite often correctly g).
Cheers,
Cùran
Cool movie, cool quote ;)
Put an entry in /etc/apt/sources.d without my consent and I'll hate you for eternity.
Ask me (or at least make it explicit that is what will happen) if I want such an entry and I'll think you are a guru (well I sometimes wonder that already).
I'm surprised that people didn't get the connection with the subjects and the reference. I guess it was slightly more explicit when I used song lyrics as it was always left with a matching "ObLyric".
For films I've used ObFilm, ObSubject, and ObQuote, depending on my mood.
Anyway adding a sources.list.d/ entry seems like isn't too evil, providing debconf was used to prompt for acceptance - with the default being no.
I'm not going to do it, because I primarily upload to both Debian and my Lenny backports repo and I use the same source for both (so I'd not want to upload to Debian, but have the package point to steve.org.uk, for example).
There are exceptions, such as the recent itag tool, but they're rare enough that if people fall behind due to manually downloading I guess I either get frustrated or ignore it.
wow, it's like an era is coming to an end. What made you cave and decide not to do the subject/quote thing?
Matt, I mostly just feel like it is time for a change. There's no specific reason.
Although I've enjoyed the film quotes, it was always difficult to judge the post by its title because it wasn't necessarily in context; meaning I've read all of your posts just to see if they're worth reading, which would usually be frustrating, except that I've found most (if not all) of your posts are very read-worthy.
Perhaps you could keep these quotes in a footer? It seems sad to see them disappear entirely.