Re: A better apt...
Jason Gunthorpe writes:
> > It will server to make the package list look a lot cleaner as
> > something like:
> >
> > xemacs20-bin 20.4-5
> > xemacs20-mule 20.4-5
> > xemacs20-mule-canna-wnn 20.4-5
> > xemacs20-nomule 20.4-5
> > xemacs20-support 20.4-5
> > xemacs20-supportel 20.4-5
> >
> > Would all be collapsed into a group called xemacs20. The group would
> > just be a package with nothing but a control file to describe stuff
> > that is common among all the packages such as the description of the
> > xemacs program the, rough version number (20.4), etc... A new tag
> > called (perhaps) "base-package" in each of the individual packages
> > will simply contain the name of the base packages in this case it
> > would be:
>
> This I do like, though how many packages like this do we really
> have?
Well, not much for now. However, once the feature is implemented, I
see an immediate use for it, to handle documentation and such. That
is, if we currently have a `foo' package, which has some doc whose
source is SGML, in both english and french, it can be splitted into eg.:
foo-base
foo-doc-sgml-en
foo-doc-html-fr
...
All of these packages would be part of the "foo" group; the user would
be by default presented only the "foo" group, and the interface (apt
or whatever) would take care of fetching the relevant parts of the
group, according to the user's preferences.
Note that if we consider this, we can already define a bunch of
groups, containing base+doc sets.
The `function' tag or a similar thing would then be a good way define
those prefs.
As for the `interface' field, I remember submitting such an idea to
the list a number of monthes ago, but I mainly got negative feedback
without much technical arguments. As an example, no opponent tried to
answer my question of how they would distinguish a program with an X11
interface from a part of the X11 system, using only `flat' keywords
(ie. what does keyword "x11" refer to ?).
I am 100% in favor of using *well structured* info, in constrast to
the *flat structure* that simple keywords can only provide. This will
give us many opportunities to make the system more user-friendly IMHO.
Regards,
--
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