So far Linux Mint has been using trivial repositories. Although they were simple to use and to maintain they were not flexible enough and were causing limitations. One of these limitation was the unability to “pin” repositories. For instance to ensure the Mint version of Firefox would hide the Ubuntu one, we had to artificially increase the version number from 2.0.0.6 to 2.0.06. These kind of dirty tricks worked fine but it was time to address the problem.
Another problem was the duplication of packages between releases.
For instance Cassandra and Celena shared the same package base so they were compatible with the same packages. Duplicating all our packages for those two releases took space on the server.
Daryna is now using a “pooled” repository organized into 3 components:
- main (all packages developped by Linux Mint, ex: mintinstall)
- upstream (all packages coming from Ubuntu and patched by Linux Mint, ex: firefox)
- import (all packages added from 3rd party sources, ex: envy)
2 additional components are also present but won’t be activated by default:
- community (all packages coming from the community or developped for a community edition, ex: sunbird-mint)
- backport (only used once a newer release is out to accept new versions of packages)
As a consequence, in your sources.list you should change :
deb http://www.linuxmint.com/repository daryna/
to
deb http://www.linuxmint.com/repository daryna main upstream import
#deb http://www.linuxmint.com/repository daryna community backport
# deb-src http://www.linuxmint.com/repository daryna main upstream import
#deb-src http://www.linuxmint.com/repository daryna community backport
Romeo will also change, starting from Daryna. Its components will represent the different Mint releases.
For instance, to get access to the Romeo packages for Daryna, you’ll use:
deb http://www.linuxmint.com/repository romeo daryna
#deb-src http://www.linuxmint.com/repository romeo daryna
The old Daryna repository is still present but will be removed when Daryna becomes stable. Romeo will be removed as well. Bianca, Cassandra and Celena will stay the way they are.
With this new repository we’re now able to pin Mint against Ubuntu and give it a higher priority.
This enables us to maintain our own packages without having to worry of future Ubuntu updates.
As Firefox is getting close to version 3.0 it was decided there was no real reason to downgrade back to 2.0.0.x. When 2.0.0.9 comes out we’ll release 2.0.09, when 3.0 comes out we’ll start fresh with the real version number.
I hope this is not too confusing 🙂 Everything will be transparent to you if you perform a fresh install of Daryna and for people who upgrade instructions will be very detailed on the subject.