Re: Metapackages (was Re: Debian Weekly News - September 14th, 1999)
* "Laurent" == Laurent Martelli <martelli@iie.cnam.fr> wrote:
Laurent> Being able to select several packages by selecting a
Laurent> metapackage is very nice, but how will uninstallation be
Laurent> handled ? Will you be able to uninstall all the packages of a
Laurent> metapackage in one step ?
* "Stephane" == Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@pasteur.fr> wrote:
Stephane> Certainly not:
Stephane> - a package can be a member of several meta-packages,
Stephane> - a package could have been installed before (and
Stephane> independently of) a metapackage which includes it).
If I understand Wichert correctly, apt will get a flag indicating if a
package was installed on its onw merrits or as a dependancy sometime.
Laurent> It would also be nice to be able to select the packages one
Laurent> by one, thus providing a new way to hierarchise packages
Laurent> without messing with the old directory structure of the
Laurent> distributions. Is this planned ?
This is not subject to the task packages.
For better organisation, there were several proposals, but they were
not persueded further although there wasn't much resistance - there
wasn't simply anyone who wanted to push it through the decision
layers).
a) New field which has additional hierarchie information like in
Package: xserver-i128
Purpose: x11/hardware, x11/server
Package: cthugha
Purpose: sound/display, graphic/demo
There is a example usage of this available. I also played with it
http://www.internet-treff.uni-koeln.de/~martin/debcat/index.html?fl=3&flc29=2#fl_29
The only thing that prevents implementation (IIRC) is that a hierarchie
has to be negotiated, and noone stepped forward to lead this efford.
b) New field with keywords.
Basically the same thing as a), but the disadvantage in my eyes is
that you have to see the available keywords to effectivly search on
them.
Take a DN Server. A user could search on "DNS", "DNS server", "DNS-Server",
"bind", "name server" etc. This is the same effect as with search
engines, where you never get the hit you really searched for.
Ciao,
Martin
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