Package: apt Version: 1.8.4 Severity: wishlist Dear Maintainer,
Thank you very much for helping keep Debian's admin tools so cool! It seems to me that managing software complexity is becoming more important as Debian acquires more packages. The main reason I'm writing is to humbly suggest a new feature to apt, apt-get and/or aptitude. It would let users specify how deeply into a packages dependency tree to upgrade dependencies to their current versions. My understanding is the current policy is to upgrade the named package to its current version, and only its dependencies if their installed versions do not happen to satisfy the named package's dependency. For example "$ aptitude upgrade sagemath failed to upgrade its dependency on the cython3 package to the latest version available in unstable, 0.29.14-0.1+b1. sagemath's dependency says ">= 0.29.1" is good enough, and 0.29.2-2 was installed. I humbly suggest added a cool new option: "-dl <levels>" where <levels> is a number specifying how deeply into the named package's dependency tree to upgrade dependencies to the currently available version. I suppose it may also accept a key word like "max" or "all" to freshen the whole dependency tree. I can imagine it helping find bugs and/or our understanding of software complexity. Either way, Debian may get better. So, Kingsley