Moin, I worked a bit on install_packages, the results are available on http://www.physik.fu-berlin.de/~glaweh/fai/
Changes: * uses libapt-pkg-perl * as often as possible uses system(@list), thus avoids quoting shell metacharacters in package lists * works with regular expressions in package lists (in apt's understanding, everything containing '.', '*' or '?' is assumed to be a regex) * checks versioned pagackes (mutt>=1.5) before handing them to apt-get * filters out virtual packages (sarge's apt quits when encountering a virtual package and lists the real packages providing this virtual package) Background: When doing a soft transtion from "woody" to "sarge", this means keeping both releases installable from the same FAI configuration, APT's support for regular expressions comes in handy for replaced packages like apt-get install .?(gmc|nautilus) (the .? is only in there to make apt-get recognize this as a regular expression) For this to work with FAI's install_packages, quite a lot of changes are necessairy because of two reasons: * apt-cache (used to filter out unavailable packages/typos) behaves differently than apt-get (no regexps, no versioned packages, doesn't throw an error on virtual packages) * the shell interprets many regex characters as metacharacters At my department, we tested this already on both woody and sarge installs, but I need some other people to test this, so Thomas can merge it into FAI. -- c u henning