Re: Getting rid of circular dependencies
Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:
> Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de> writes:
>
>> But that doesn't realy solve the problem on its own. It would be nice if
>> packages could be consistently taged with "Application:
>> yes|no|<untaged>" signifying that this package is usefull on its own
>> (foo), will never be used alone (foo-data, libfoo) or is
>> ambigious. Frontends should then hide anything with "Application: no"
>> under normal operations.
>
> This is a really interesting idea, particularly if it were combined with
> an implementation recommendation to stop suppressing Application: no
> packages if they're listed in Suggests of an installed package or list an
> installed package in Enhances. That way, documentation packages could be
> listed in Suggests but otherwise be Application: no, since the sort of
> user who doesn't want to see all the library packages is probably also not
> going to want to browse the list of documentation packages for packages
> they don't have installed.
Or a "Package-Type: application | lib | data | doc | dev | common |
dummy". A yes/no field is hard to extend to more cases.
As a bonus the 'Package-Type: dummy" would be packages needed to
handle package renames or replacements and can be savely purged on the
next aptitude/debfoster/deborphan run.
MfG
Goswin
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