Re: Potato now stable
On Mon, Aug 14, 2000 at 10:55:59PM -0600, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
>
> Clearly the desired effect of all meta-packages is to provide the user
> with a single node to manipulate and view a group of packages. They should
> have special properties in any UI, you should be able to view and
> manipulate their grouped packages. Idillicly the grouping would have
> priorities of packages (ie -python doesn't need to install every freaking
> package, but some are definately critical) and the ability to track and
> optionally install new packages added to the group, remove the whole
> group, etc.
>
Under the Irix packaging system (quite nice UI except that it has to
handle Irix packages..) packages exist in a hierarchy, with lowest level
packages quite fine grained. For example:
I fw_bzip2 02/28/2000 bzip2-0.9.0c Compress/decompress files
I fw_bzip2.man 02/28/2000 bzip2-0.9.0c man pages
I fw_bzip2.man.bzip2 02/28/2000 bzip2-0.9.0c man pages
I fw_bzip2.man.info 02/28/2000 bzip2-0.9.0c info pages
I fw_bzip2.man.relnotes 02/28/2000 bzip2-0.9.0c Release Notes
I fw_bzip2.sw 02/28/2000 bzip2-0.9.0c execution only env
I fw_bzip2.sw.bzip2 02/28/2000 bzip2-0.9.0c execution only env
I fw_bzip2.sw.hdr 02/28/2000 bzip2-0.9.0c header files
I fw_bzip2.sw.lib 02/28/2000 bzip2-0.9.0c shared libraries
I fw_bzip2.sw64 02/28/2000 bzip2-0.9.0c 64-bit execution only env
I fw_bzip2.sw64.lib 02/28/2000 bzip2-0.9.0c 64-bit shared libs
Some of these are marked for default installation if the top level
(fw_bzip2) is selected. Others are non-default. Still others (the sw64's)
are only installed by default if the hardware they're being installed on is
capable of running them. You can unfold the selection and mark components
(full fledged packages themselves) for install if you really want to, but
most times the defaults are fine. You can use wildcards for instance to
delete all info page packages without going beyond the package system.
We could probably use something similar to handle localization and multiple
architectures.
Many of our packages are already hierarchical ( x-dev, x-doc, libx, ...),
but not in a formal way that the user interface can use to shorten the list
a user sees.
-Drake
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