On Wed, Oct 12, 2005 at 03:13:30AM +0200, Adeodato Simó <asp16@alu.ua.es> was heard to say: > As mentioned in [1], we've been considering switching to Recommends > for KDE metapackges, and mention in the description about the use of > --with-recommends. > > What perhaps would be really best, though, would be some kind of > special handling for metapackages from aptitude et al. For example > (just the first I could think of), assume --with-recommends for > packages that have "Metapackage: yes". But this leaves the problem of > how to detect on upgrades if a recommended but not installed package > was uninstalled by the user, or newly introduced in the new version. > Daniel, do you have any comments on this? Is there a bug open about > handling of metapackages, or perhaps would be a good idea to open one? The issue of recommendations appearing in new versions is a general problem, not one specific to metapackages. I have some code that tries to detect new recommendations, but I haven't actually used it as a replacement for the default rule of "only recommendations of newly installed packages are important". I need to talk to the apt developers about how to integrate this (last time I checked apt changes were needed to get it working), then test it. In addition to forcing the program to follow recommendations, the other thing to deal with is the interaction between metapackages and "cruft removal". I think you could deal with that using the rule that "when a metapackage is placed into manual mode, so are all its (pre)dependencies and recommendations". This would make it annoying to put a metapackage back into automatic mode, but it's safe and not hard to I don't remember if there are any bugs open about metapackages, but they aren't especially useful until we have a way of formally identifying metapackages; e.g., by adding a "Metapackage: yes" header in the control file. On the other hand, debtags does flag metapackages, and I can probably work with that for the time being. Daniel
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