Re: RFC: apt-get install-deps subcommand?

[Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de>]

Sergio Talens-Oliag <sto@debian.org> writes:

>   Hello,
>
>   I'm working on a toolkit to define and handle Custom Debian Distributions.
>   My idea is to define a CDD using a description file that declares a set of
>   tasks that depend on other tasks and on *real* debian packages. This file is
>   parsed by a Python script that generates the input files of shell scripts
>   that take care of installing, upgrading and removing those tasks. The shell
>   scripts are there to avoid the need for python on the installed system (i.e.
>   for small custom systems) and for the debian-installer.
>
>   The problem I've found is that I don't want to generate metapackages for the
>   tasks (they have caused problems in the past on the Debian archive and I feel
>   that there is no need for them anyway, as they are usually used only to
>   install sets of packages and are not needed after that), I simply want to be
>   able to satisfy the dependencies, but apt-get does not let me to do it
>   without metapackages.
>
>   My idea is to have a command to do something like:
>
>     # apt-get install-deps nvi (>> 1.78) | vim, ed

Just an idea:

Can't your python script resolve those to actual packages? If that is
too hard build a meta package locally, run apt-get -s install on it
(with an empty status file) and parse what apt-get would do.

MfG
        Goswin