Re: Ignoring dependance on "important" packages?

["Martin Bialasinski" <martin@internet-treff.uni-koeln.de>]

>> "Stephane" == Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@pasteur.fr> wrote:

Stephane> A general problem with 'tasks and profiles as regular
Stephane> packages' is the deletion. Once packages have been pulled in
Stephane> by a dependency on task-something, there is no way to
Stephane> suppress them (but one by one).

Yes. And there is no elegant way to solve this yet. Nevertheless, it
works nicely. I have this note in the task-gnome-* packages:

  The purpose of this package is to aid you with the installation               
  of GNOME. If you select this package, multiple packages will                  
  be selected in a conflict resolution screen for installation.                 
  You can override the selection by deselection this package and                
  any other ones you don't want with "-". The remaining packages                
  will then be installed.                                                       

I haven't read the dpkgv2 proposal yet, but a useful thing would be
one-shot packages, that won't actually install, so their dependancy
requirements are only used in this one run of the package tool.

Actually, I think this shouldn't be that difficult to add to
apt-get. Just a commandline option meaning "use the dependancy information
of the packages given at the command line, but don't install these
packages, only the ones pulled by the dependancies".

Well, one could add many things to apt if one can actually code
... :-)

E.g. command line options to apt-get that makes it pull suggests and
recommands as well, not only depends.

Have to make a note about this to make a suggestion when I have time.

Ciao,
	Martin