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IRC discussion summary about using debtags to replace tasksel for CDDs



Hello,

Today Ben Armstrong came up with this idea on IRC:

 SysrG> [...] we could make an apt hook that allows a user to continue
 to receive *new* packages on each apt update as they enter debian
 junior via suite::junior debtagging?

 of course, if the selection causes a conflict, the user needs to
 intervene.  and if the user intervenes, apt should remember the user's
 choice for next time.

 for a crude first version, I'd just need a pre-hook, as in
 apt-listchanges, that reads the debtags the user has previously
 selected and selects for installation everything that matches "debtags
 the user has previously selected" can just be manually listed in a conf
 file in /etc for now

This spawned an interesting conversation:

 mornfall> you are actually proposing an interesting concept
 enrico> SynrG: debtags-based package subscription channels...
         interesting!
 enrico> perfectly doable, actually (debtags-wise):
         for pkgname in `debtags grep 'tag expression' | tagcoll items`
	 do
	 	process $pkgname
	 done

The problem is marking the packages for installation.  One could do
just this:

 debtags grep 'any tag expression' | \
    sed -re 's/: .+/ install/' | \
    dpkg --set-selections

this would work for dselect.  apt would ignore it.  aptitude worked on
my system but didn't work on Ben's system.

Then there's the problem of apt hooks.  Currently one can't do apt hooks
(I just posted about this yesterday, although I only managed to get the
mail to arrive in deity list:
http://lists.debian.org/deity/2006/03/msg00006.html).

Interesting idea, potentially trivial to implement, but it seems to be
fairly hard to convince all the various package managers to do all
together the same thing.


Ciao,

Enrico

-- 
GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico@debian.org>

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