Re: Package Management System
On Mon, May 13, 2002 at 10:35:05AM +0200, HAESSIG Jean-Christophe wrote:
> 1.the Problem
>
> Consider Apache and Webmin : when a user installs one of the two
> packages, he doesn't have to know the relationship between them.
> However, if both packages were installed, it would be stupid not to
> see that you can install apache-webmin.
Another example would be almost every emacs mode package. (post-el,
python2.2-elisp, dpkg-dev-el. Each of these packages would like to be
suggested by a given package, but only if emacs is installed.
I would suggest a different (and maybe, hopefully simpler) way of dealing
with the issue. I also have no idea how hard it would be to implement. My
idea would be adding in a separate field "Suggested By" (it would need a
better name), and put the information in the package that wants to be
suggested if a given package is installed. The interface to seeing this
'suggested by' would probably be different from a true suggest, possibly
even under the "Packages that depend on" section in aptitude, although it
would be nicer to put it in or near the suggested packages.
So the idea would be that dpkg-dev-el depends on emacs and suggests
dpkg-dev (as it does now), and has a 'suggested-by' field listing dpkg-dev.
So now, if you install dpkg-dev and have already emacs installed, aptitude
will see that the depends for dpkg-dev-el are satisfied and list it as a
suggested-by package under dpkg-dev.
I'm pretty sure my idea wouldn't be flexible enough to handle every case,
and might be a pain to implement, but it certainly would be nice to get a
hint when installing that these emacs modes exist.
--
David Roundy
http://civet.berkeley.edu/droundy/
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