On Sunday 08 January 2006 11:39, Colin Watson wrote: > Does anyone else think this would be useful? If so, I can put some > effort into implementing it. I have tried giving this some thought, but I'm afraid thinking through the implications is rather over my head. My first reaction is that formalizing dependencies like this will make backward support of previous releases even harder than it already is, although it may be needed if automatic udeb propagation is implemented. Most of the time we lag behind changes in regular packages though. I think the recent flurry of changes around pkgsel, debconf and tasksel is probably an exception. Also, if you want to keep backward support for installing older releases, just failing is not really what you'd want. Instead, you'd want to be able to select an alternative path in the installer if a package is not available in /target (as in the case of Sarge and the initramfs generators) or if the version implementing new features is not available in /target. Or maybe you want to completely disable a udeb if some functionality is not supported in target and use a different one instead. I do agree though that recent changes in d-i have made the dependency between udebs and packages in /target greater than before and we very much need to keep backward compatibility in mind when making changes in anything from base-installer onward.
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