Re: debtags support proposed for xcontrol
Hi,
On Sun, Apr 06, 2008 at 03:51:08AM +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> For your information, I have proposed to add support for debtags
> expansions to debian-xcontrol.
I'm not sure that would be practical.
Debian policy disallows us from regenerating the control file because it
should never contain dynamic information, so when a new package is added
that matches the selected criteria, it will still require manual action,
so the benefit is minimal.
At the same time, it is hard to implement, because there is a desire to
allow backports to pull the package list from stable+backports, while
for unstable it needs to be pulled from unstable and so on, so we'd need
a way to specify which sources are relevant, essentially duplicating
large parts of APT.
I think the best way to implement functionality like that would be to
teach aptitude that all packages matching a certain pattern should be
installed, and then pre-set that in the CDD to auto-install packages
from a certain task or matching a tag specification (i.e. make this a
runtime decision). There could/should also be a synergy effect with the
fix for the long-standing issue of updated installations missing
features that freshly-installed installations have -- a mechanism to
automatically install all new packages above priority standard would fix
that.
Simon
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