On Wed, Aug 27, 2003 at 09:09:01AM +0200, Filip Van Raemdonck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> was heard to say: > On Tue, Aug 26, 2003 at 11:40:23PM -0600, Jason Gunthorpe wrote: > > > (apt-pkg changes) > > > > - IsCritical->IsImportant... The Critical/Important differentiation > > never seems to have panned out. The distinction was ment to allow a > > policy routine to manage things like suggests. If connectiva says > > removing it makes things much faster then might as well, but remove > > _all_ traces of IsImportant. > > That's rather "IsImportantDep", isn't it? > I'm not all too familiar with the distinction between these two, but > gnome-apt uses the latter rather than IsCritical. What _is_ the > difference?
From memory and a brief look at some code: IsCritical returns true iff the dependency is one that must be resolved for system integrity, such as Depends or Predepends (there may be more conditions I've forgotten) IsImportantDep is a virtual method on Policy which returns true if the dependency should be enforced when first installing a package. It defaults to being equivalent to IsCritical(). It's used when auto-installing dependencies of a package. > It's probably more of a problem for aptitude. Downloading it's source and > grepping reveals that it frequently uses both, and ISTR aptitude having > more complete support for policies than any other apt frontend (dselect > left aside, but it doesn't use apt-pkg) aptitude uses IsCritical to test whether dependencies are critical (mostly for output purposes IIRC), and overrides IsImportantDep to force recommended packages to be installed. (there's also a suspicious-looking use of IsImportantDep in matchers.cc, which should maybe morph to IsCritical) > Downloading and grepping some more: synaptic appears to use only > IsImportantDep, the (now obsolete) stormpkg uses both, deity (which isn't > in the archive anymore but it's maintainer has expressed to be still > interested in getting it back in sometime) uses only IsImportantDep. I'd imagine they all do something similar with Recommends -- it's the obvious (and, from Jason's comments above, intended) way of implementing that. Daniel -- /-------------------- Daniel Burrows <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -------------------\ | All generalizations are dangerous. | \------- (if (not (understand-this)) (go-to http://www.schemers.org)) --------/
