user labels, about the future of APT

[A Mennucc1 <msm@Tonelli.sns.it>]

hi 

I am a Debian fanatic (but not yet a mantainer... I have no time)

I just read the document about "the future featueres of APT"

I have always thought that I would love to have one feature that
I now describe

as you propose , APT should manage groups of packets in a more flexible
way than the presernt "main/* non-free/* ecc"
Indeed there should be groups named "basilar installation"
"simple small X terminal" "gcc development" "WWW server machine"
: this is what ordinary people would expect from Debian (or, any OS)

all the bove could be thought of as 
"groups proposed by Debian", and are static, from the user view point.
What I would propose is that there should be also "dynamic
groups defined the user", I will call them "user labels".

To exemplify, these are example of "user's label"
 work, study, amusement, trial, dependency, development

They should be chosen , and attached, by the user to
the package ; in particular when s/he installs/uninstall it

Whats the catch?

suppose that you want to try a new package :
when you install it, you mark it as "trial" ;
supp.that dpkg tell you that you need to there are
some other packages to be installed (mostly, libraries)
if you accept, apt marks them as "dependency" 

when you at a certain point want to install another package ,
and do not have disk space, you ask apt for a list of "trial" pkgs
and delete some of them ; if it is not enough, you pass to the "amusemnt"
ecc

in particular, there shoudl be a direct command , lets call it
"unneeded dependency removal" that removes all files
that where installed because of dependency needs but
that are not needed anymore: this one I would really love

Note that to have the above command, you need to label the
pkgs at installation, and then it may be interesting to
extend the use of  these labels as above

so, I send this email to  debian-devel... if the idea is accepted,
it may be added in the list of specifications for APT

thanks

a.Mennucc1


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