Re: Proposing task-debian
On Wed, May 02, 2001 at 12:30:23PM +1000, Sam Couter wrote:
> Matt Zimmerman <mdz@debian.org> wrote:
> >
> > A cleaner implementation would be to create a simple program or script that
> > would attempt to remove a given package and (recursively) all of its
> > dependencies, skipping any that are depended upon by packages outside of the
> > set of packages being manipulated. So if you had installed
> > task-x-window-system-core, then later installed xterm (which depends on xlibs),
> > you could run this hypothetical program on task-x-window-system-core, and
> > remove all of the pieces of task-x-window-system-core that were not needed by
> > other packages.
> >
> > This would make a good python-apt script.
>
> Yeah, and you could call it... Let's see... debfoster is a good name!
debfoster does not do what I described, as you can see by its description.
> sam@krusty:~$ apt-cache show debfoster
> Package: debfoster
> Priority: optional
> Section: admin
> Installed-Size: 80
> Maintainer: Ivo Timmermans <ivo@debian.org>
> Architecture: i386
> Version: 1.99+2.0pre8-2
> Depends: libc6 (>= 2.2.2-2)
> Recommends: apt
> Filename: pool/main/d/debfoster/debfoster_1.99+2.0pre8-2_i386.deb
> Size: 18488
> MD5sum: 9889daf0211f8ebae701f71d45fc5790
> Description: Install only wanted Debian packages
> debfoster is a wrapper program for apt and dpkg. When first run, it
> will ask you which of the installed packages you want to keep
> installed.
> .
> After that, it maintains a list of packages that you want to have
> installed on your system. It uses this list to detect packages that
> have been installed only because other packages depended on them. If
> one of these dependencies changes, debfoster will take notice, and
> ask if you want to remove the old package.
> .
> This helps you to maintain a clean Debian install, without old
> (mainly library) packages lying around that aren't used any more.
How does this allow you to remove a task package in an intuitive way? That
is what this discussion was about.
--
- mdz
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