Re: debtags support proposed for xcontrol
On Mon, 7 Apr 2008, Simon Richter wrote:
Hence my suggestion of implementing that inside aptitude, since it has a
good overview what package sources the user has selected, and it allows
you to get rid of the metapackages altogether (or replace them with a
small package that adds a configuration setting to apt stating that
packages matching a certain criteria should be automatically installed
on sight), and thus overcome the "all-or-nothing" limitation of
metapackages that might be confusing for the user if some package
required by the metapackage is currently uninstallable.
I agree with you that meta packages are sometimes unflexible. But the
fact that a package is "currently" uninstallable should in principle
only happen in distributions different from stable. Users who are
using unstable should not be confused by such things but file a bug
report instead and thus the CDD maintainers get better chances to
know that things are happening they should care about. I'm in favour
of this personally.
I can see another way of implementing that in a policy compliant manner:
If the "Depends-Debtags:" field exists, append "${debtags:Depends}" to
the normal dependency spec during control file generation, and determine
the list of packages at compile time with a separate tool that reads the
spec in the xcontrol file and generates appropriate substvars.
IMHO a really interesting idea. However I see a drawback here: If
you build the packages at different points in time (delays of auto
builders, some other reasons to rebuild the packages later) you might
get different dependencies in the resulting binaries in case the
Debtags database changed. I don't know whether I really like that.
About your other idea, looking whether packages are available on an arch
and omitting them if not: can be done, something similar was on my list
already (although the static version where "foo [i386]" would be
replaced by "not+i386 | foo"; I can certainly see that happening with
substvars as well for Arch: any packages, but it will be difficult for
Arch: all as we cannot see what the other arches have).
Huh, why can't we see this? Parsing the Packages.arch.gz files
comes to mind. I planned to do this for the cdd-dev tools but if
it would be implemented in xcontrol I could save my time and just
create a xcontrol file and leave the processing of this to debian-xcontrol.
I like the idea of saving my time very much. ;-)
BTW, if it comes to parsing Packages files I've written something that
does this for i386 for the moment. It uses python-debian:
svn svn://svn.debian.org/debian-med/trunk/community/infrastructure/scripts/cddtasktools.py
Kind regards
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de
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