Re: Install profiles

[Simon Richter <sjr@debian.org>]

Hi,

On 6/15/23 01:00, Julian Andres Klode wrote:

> based on some discussion on IRC I want to propose install
> profiles.

> Recommends: foo <bar>
> Suggests: foo <bar>

Should there also be a negative form

    Recommends: foo-nobar <!bar>

or is

    Recommends: foo <bar> | foo-nobar

expressive enough?

Also, this can be expressed as either

    Recommends: foo <bar> | foo-nobar

or as

    Recommends: foo <bar>, foo | foo-nobar

Presumably, the former should be the normal form for that.

The reason I'm bringing this up is the bigger dpkg change here: 
maintaining the list is trivial, but there is also the dependency 
merging code that coalesces things like

    Depends: foo (>> 1), foo (>> 2)

into

    Depends: foo (>> 2)

and this code would probably also need to be adapted, or we'd need to 
introduce an asymmetry between Depends and Recommends/Suggests 
processing that would need to be documented really well.

   Simon