Previously Mitch Blevins wrote: > 1) It keeps a hidden (not viewable thru the apt interface) status > list of the files that have been marked to be de-installed > when packages that depend on them are removed. Valid point, we'll need to add that. I'll put it in version 2.1 of the design. > 2) It doesn't allow for people who are upgrading and already have > these 'dependent-but-useless-by-themselves' packages installed. > It wont mark them unless they are newly installed because of > a dependency. Basically this is an upgrading problem and is already covered by your third point. > 3) It doesn't allow fine-grained control. You can't unmark a package > if you decide later that it is useful by itself. You can only > set a global option to not remove it, which will disable this > functionality for all packages. This is very much related to the first point: since the UI doesn't show this flag you obviously can not toggle it > Define a boolean status field for 'Hooked', which can be toggled > on or off by the user thru the APT interface. Personally I'l look the term `Auto' more, to note that installation and removal for these packages is done automatically. > (marking a 'Remove' or 'Purge' packages as Hooked are non-sensical, but also > non-harmful) It doesn't make any sense at all, so it should be disallowed. > Have APT (perhaps controlled by a global option) mark packages > as Hooked when they are installed to satisfy a dependency. You want to use the global flag to initialize the Auto/Hooked flag probably. > This proposal does not require changes to the .deb format, but > probably will require changes to dpkg, in order to have it perform > correctly during 'dpkg --pending --remove', etc. No it does not, since it a apt-specific thing dpkg does not need to know about it, since apt will just call dpkg to do the work, not make the decisions. Wichert. -- ============================================================================== This combination of bytes forms a message written to you by Wichert Akkerman. E-Mail: wakkerma@cs.leidenuniv.nl WWW: http://www.wi.leidenuniv.nl/~wichert/
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