APT: a little idea

[Federico Di Gregorio <fog@debian.org>]

Hi *,

	first of all sorry for the bad placement of this message
but I can't remember the right ML for APT. (Please move this thread
to the right ML and keep me in the cc. Thanx.)

About a week ago someone (re)proposed the old lets-remove-the-depends-
-when-the-progam-is-purged. If I remember correctly this issue will be
resolved in APT (not dpkg) by adding an Auto: tag to the package
control file. Here's my little idea to make things ever better. Lets
use a tag (choose your favourite name, I'll use AbstractionLevel:) with 
a numeric value. The values will be set as follows:

1 - libs and packages required by other software but without any use
    by themselves

2 - standard applcations, -dev packages, etc

3 - meta packages (e.g., gnome, x11.) simply depending on other
    real packages

4 - large system configurations; i.e., meta packages that span lots
    of other packages (graphical workstation, sgml-processing-box,
    router, web server.)

This will give us two advantages:

a. you can tell the graphical frontend to apt-get (be it apt, gnome-apt 
or anything else) to show you information only to a certain abstraction
level. That is, you can leave out pure dependencies (libraries) or even
single packages.

b. you can tell apt to automatically remove packages up to a certain
level. E.g., on purge remove all the unneeded libs (level 1) but keep
the packages even if I remove the meta package that installed them
(keep on level >2).

Just my $0.02,
Federico

-- 
Federico Di Gregorio                    {Friend of Penguins}
Debian GNU/Linux Developer                    fog@debian.org
Debian Italian Press Contact             press-it@debian.org
                "Best friends are often failed lovers" -- Me