Re: cleaning up lib*-dev packages?

[Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de>]

Matthias Julius <lists@julius-net.net> writes:

> Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de> writes:
>
>> Then I had the idea that I could just as well convert Sources files to
>> create pseudo packages for sources that depend on all the
>> Build-Depends. So I create a dummy deb without contents and converted
>> the Sources file to have src-foobar as package name for foobar, the
>> Build-Depends as Depends and the empty dummy deb as Filename
>> entry. After that I could just do
>>
>> apt-get install src-foobar
>>
>> and it pulls in all the Build-Depends for foobar. The best thing is
>> that, if the Build-Depends of a package change, the next apt-get
>> update/dist-upgrade will pull in the new Build-Depends since the
>> Sources file gets converted on each fresh donwload and the src-foobar
>> package then gets updated.
>
> I think a more elegant solution would be if aptitude had a command to
> install build-depends.  It could attach a new flag to a package that
> causes aptitude to treat build-depends just like depends of that
> package.  This way aptitude would mark build-depends as automatically
> installed and remove them if they are not needed anymore.
>
> Matthias

That wouldn't work well with dpkg, apt-get, deborphan, debfoster.

I would also think that aptitude uses /var/lib/dpkg/status for the
list of installed packages and the build-depends would not show up
there. Aptitude would need its own list of imaginaryinstalled sources
to keep track of them.

With pseudo packages you can run "dpkg --purge src-foobar" and the
next time aptitude runs it would suggest cleaning up.


I'm also thinking of actualy populating the source packages with the
actual source. "apt-get install src-foo" would then install all the
build-depends and put the source files into /usr/src. So if you want
to work on a package you could do:

apt-get install src-foobar
dpkg-source -x /usr/src/foobar*.dsc
cd foobar*/
sensible-editor
debuild

But I'm not so sure how usefull that would actualy be.

MfG
        Goswin