Replying to a few messages at once.
On Mon, May 07, 2001 at 06:16:29PM +0100, Julian Gilbey wrote:
> My thought was that apt and dselect would be taught to recognise
> Tasks: as a new type of dependency header, similar to Depends,
> Recommends and Suggests, but with slightly different rules.
On Mon, May 07, 2001 at 07:32:10PM -0400, Sam Hartman wrote:
> So, I think that support in tools besides tasksel is critical to this
> policy proposal being useful. I don't like the idea of having
> frontend-specific fields being mandated by policy and don'tt see a
> need for tasksel to be a distinguished frontend. I understand why
> apt-get might not want to support or reverse-recommends, but I think
> that the actual frontends should support this.
Remember: the point of tasks is to make the initial install simpler,
so that people can get started on Debian without having to wade through
dselect.
So it's not a problem if *nothing* other than tasksel can handle
installing and removing tasks elegantly yet. It's unlikely dpkg or apt-get
will handle tasks directly ever, but perhaps some of the frontends (deity
or dselect) will eventually. If you want to hack on this at some point,
that's fine, but getting tasks to work for their primary goal is much
more important right now.
On Mon, May 07, 2001 at 04:23:47PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> > My thought was that apt and dselect would be taught to recognise
> > Tasks: as a new type of dependency header, similar to Depends,
> > Recommends and Suggests, but with slightly different rules.
> If this were done, I would much prefer it were called Reverse-Recommends,
> since such a thing is useful for other purposes too.
Task: headers are more akin to Section: headers than Recommends:. Both in
that people really ought to be able to just uninstall a package if they
don't like it, and in that the complexity of dependency specifications
just isn't warranted. It's quite reasonable, for example, to try
to setup a mail server (with SMTP and POP and IMAP and maybe even a
webmail application, say) and then decide you'd like to replace exim
with postfix, eg.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``_Any_ increase in interface difficulty, in exchange for a benefit you
do not understand, cannot perceive, or don't care about, is too much.''
-- John S. Novak, III (The Humblest Man on the Net)
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