Re: first draft "aptitude howto"

[Daniel Burrows <Daniel_Burrows@brown.edu>]

On Tue, Apr 04, 2000 at 11:37:10AM -0500, Steve Greenland was heard to say:
[snip]
> Please don't *duplicate* information, unless you're willing to keep the
> duplicates consistent. Dpkg/dselect currently store statuses such as
> "want to install", "installed", "installed but needing configuration",
> "on hold", "removed but not purged", "purged/uninstalled", etc.

  I'm not duplicating it, I'm representing it in a different way which can't be
mapped to and from the dselect states without losing information: for example,
you can't have a "to be installed but also new" state in dselect.

> If the new front end changes any of those statuses, it needs to do it a way
> that dpkg/dselect will notice and deal with.

  The *only* status changes that dselect won't notice are information about the
user's intent: ie, this package should be installed, removed, upgraded, held
downgraded, etc.  I don't see this as being a huge problem, except for
information about holds.

  Daniel