Re: [Fwd: major problem with gnome-games dependency]

[Adeodato Simó <asp16@alu.ua.es>]

  [CC'ing the aptitude maintainer, mainly for the last paragraph.]

* Jeroen van Wolffelaar [Tue, 11 Oct 2005 22:00:22 +0200]:

> The main things that this thread shows me, is that it is *not* immediately
> clear to people not too familiar with Debian that the removal of the 'gnome'
> package will not have *any* effect on what actual software is actually installed
> on your system.

  Do not forget, though, that with aptitude becoming the prefered tool
  for package management (over plain apt-get), this is no longer true.
  "aptitude install gnome" will mark all of its dependencies as "auto",
  i.e. just installed because of a dependency. Which means that
  "aptitude remove gnome" will want to remove all the dependencies _for
  real_, unless they have been previously marked as "noauto" by hand.

  If grasping the concept "removing a metapackage won't remove the
  dependencies" was already difficult, grasping the whole auto/noauto
  story can be... ykwim. Which, IMV, means that the user should not have
  to care (much) about that.

                                 * * *

  As mentioned in [1], we've been considering switching to Recommends
  for KDE metapackges, and mention in the description about the use of
  --with-recommends.

  What perhaps would be really best, though, would be some kind of
  special handling for metapackages from aptitude et al. For example
  (just the first I could think of), assume --with-recommends for
  packages that have "Metapackage: yes". But this leaves the problem of
  how to detect on upgrades if a recommended but not installed package
  was uninstalled by the user, or newly introduced in the new version.
  Daniel, do you have any comments on this? Is there a bug open about
  handling of metapackages, or perhaps would be a good idea to open one?

  Cheers,

-- 
Adeodato Simó
    EM: asp16 [ykwim] alu.ua.es | PK: DA6AE621
 
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.  Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man.
                -- George Bernard Shaw