Re: Could be considered a *Debian Blend* a CDD with packages from diferent repos

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

Le Thu, May 20, 2010 at 08:29:50AM +0200, Jonas Smedegaard a écrit :
> On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 10:46:12AM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
>>
>> one of the problems of the above strategy is that it does not work with 
>> aptitude, which will even remove the suggested package installed by  
>> apt-get. Also, once one starts to use APT::Install-Suggests=true, it  
>> means that he can not use ‘apt-get autoremove’ for its normal intended  
>> use, which is to deinstall the packages that are not needed anymore on  
>> the system after an upgrade.
>
> Hmm - are you sure about that?  I got the impression that Aptitude flags 
> "auto-installed" separately from the static "suggests" hints.

Hi Jonas,

I made a couple of tests on my machine, where the med-bio metapackage is
installed.

‘apt-get -o APT::Install-Suggests=true install t-coffee’ installs t-coffee-doc
and t-coffee-examples, which is expected as the other suggested packages are
recommended by med-bio. If I install an unrelated package with aptitude, it
removes t-coffee-doc and t-coffee-examples. I then purged t-coffee, and tried
to install it with aptitude, with the command ‘aptitude -o
APT::Install-Suggests=true install t-coffee’, but aptitude seems to ignore
APT::Install-Suggests=true. This shows that we may not be able to work with
aptitude.

Later, I realised another and bigger problem: APT::Install-Suggests=true has a
recursive effect. Ran in a minimal system, ‘apt-get -o
APT::Install-Suggests=true install t-coffee’ tried to pull an enormous number
of packages. APT::Install-Suggests=true therefore can give very different
results according on which system it is used, which is I think a killer problem
in our case.

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles