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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