On Sun, Dec 04, 2011 at 11:47:30PM +0100, Goswin von Brederlow wrote: > Joerg Jaspert <jo...@ganneff.de> writes: > > > metapackages, which is for metapackages so that apt can do special > > handling on them. > > On IRC Joerg mentioned that transitional packages could/should also go > to the metapackages section. > > The reasoning being that both metapackages and transitional packages > should have their dependencies marked as non-automatic so they don't get > removed when the top package is removed. > > I think mixing the two types of packages would be a mistake as one wants > quite a different behaviour from them: > > metapackages: keep them installed > transitional: remove after upgrade once nothing depends on it > > So maybe there should be a "transitional" section to keep the two types > of packages apart. If there are seconds to this please someone open a > bug about it.
Ubuntu uses metapackages and oldlibs with that option of APT apparently (APT::Never-MarkAuto-Sections). > > > > Personally I'm also not quite sure about the validity of marking all > dependencies of metapackages non-automatic. As mentioned in the > bugreport what happens if I want to remove gnome and install something > else? Then I have to manually remove all the dependencies of gnome. There's also the problem that if a meta package removes a dependency in a later version, that package will still stay of the system with the current implementation. > > I think dependencies of metapackages should be left as automatic but > frontends should ask wether to turn them all to non-automatic when the > meta package is selected for removal. So at removal time one would get > the choice of keeping all/some or removing them all. This could also > only ask if the metapackage was non-automatic. There's also the problem that if a meta package removes a dependency in a later version, that package will still stay of the system with the current implementation > > Transitional packages on the other hand should just be removed with > their dependencies set to the same state the transitional package was in > (automatic -> leave them alone, non-automatic -> set them > non-automatic). I guess something like this works already if the package disappears (no files on the system anymore IIRC) during the upgrade. > > MfG > Goswin > > PS: shouldn't frontends use the Tag: role::metapackage, special::meta? We don't read tags in APT and thus do not have them in the cache, so that's a bit harder to implement sanely. The metapackages section was in use by Ubuntu already, so I did not think about it further. -- Julian Andres Klode - Debian Developer, Ubuntu Member See http://wiki.debian.org/JulianAndresKlode and http://jak-linux.org/. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20111205111434.ga3...@debian.org