Package: aptitude Version: 0.8.13-3 Severity: wishlist
Hi. I couldn't find a way in the documentation to get the following done. What's often wanted when maintaining large clusters of systems, which have a similar (but not exactly equal) set of packages is a mode where apitude would contine perform the selected actions if - and only if - exactly those (and those alone) could be performed. Imagine I want to replace package foo with a similar package bar: aptitude install foo_ bar+ This would then required interactive input, which could of course be avoided with --assume-yes. The problem with --assume-yes is, that it affects all Y/N question. Imagine that there's one package baz which stricly depends on foo. aptitude --assume-yes install foo_ bar+ Would now also delete baz, but this is not what was specified, but rather just a consequence of the --assume-yes. So ideally there would be some --magic option which behaves like this: aptitude --magic install foo_ bar+ - If nothing (pre-)depends on foo AND nothing conflicts/breaks bar => do it. - Recommens on foo would be ignored, so even if something would Recommend it since exactly foo_ bar+ could be done, the Recommend doesn't count. - I think it would not be possible to combine --magic with e.g. --with-recommends, --purge-unused or any other option, that would automatically change what's done in terms of changing the package status. But maybe, one might want to add another variant, e.g. --magic-with-installs which would allow any non-explicitly named installations (e.g. Dependencies or Recommends). - If there would be an option, that allows removal of Essential packages, the logic should still apply, say if one would say: aptitude --allow-removing-essentials --magic install base-files_ this would still not work, as e.g. bash, which depends on base-files would also needed to be removed but is not specified to be so Also --magic should mean, that actions are only performed if *all* of them can be done, consider: aptitude --magic install bash&M foo_ If something depends on foo (and thus foo wouldn't be removed with --maigc) bash&M shouldn't be performed either; neither should e.g. any installations). Cheers, Chris