feature request for nala fetch

[osevan]

Hi devs,

Nala is best apt Frontend in Debian universe and this is the reason why i want usefull add ins.

Nala fetch pinging every repository and listing repositories with lowest response time in chronicle order.

But for unattended run we should have possibility to tell nala fetch first 2 fastest response server should be added.

Example "nala fetch 1,2" or "nala fetch 1,2,3"

For three servers but without user interactions - very important.

As another addition, -no one did this before even apt- , upgrading and downgrading between debian repository with one command.

Yes you read well:

When debian sources list, is in stable repo and someone want upgrade to testing or unstable than this should possible just with one command :

nala repo-upgrade sid/unstable/testing or stable AND "nala fetch 1,2" in one shot like
"nala repo-upgrade sid fetch 1,2"

As arguments for shell and than unattended upgrade should possible-without any user interaction.

And the same for downgrade

Example from sid back to stable:

"nala repo-upgrade stable fetch 1,2".

I hope my idea and brainstorming should help improve nala.

Becaude when you dont plant this, admins need to workaround with shellscripts and expect commands unnecessary.

Thanks and

Best regards

[volitank]

You can already do this with nala fetch --auto -y By default this will get 3 mirrors. You can use nala fetch --fetches 2 --auto -y which will select only the 2 faster mirrors. The -y is important for now to make it uninteractive. This is all documented if you type nala fetch --help

To upgrade from say Bookworm to Sid using fetch this is also possible just due to how repos work. You could type something like nala fetch --debian sid to select the release. Or with the uninteractive method nala fetch --debian sid --fetches 2 --auto -y

You could then chain that to upgrade so the final command would be something like nala fetch --debian sid --fetches 2 --auto -y && nala full-upgrade -y. You can go one step further for it being uninteractive by setting env variable DEBIAN_FRONTEND=uninteractive, this will cause deb conf prompts to not bug you during installation of packages, which may have unintended results such as replacing configuration files you don't want it to replace..

As for downgrading that is a very complex issue. This is not supported by libapt at all so it would all need to be hand rolled. A command like this is very likely to ruin your system, and would need a lot of work and testing. I do have some plans to attempt this in the future but it's very low priority as there is a lot of other things to work on for Nala.