Re: cleaning up lib*-dev packages?

[Matthias Julius <lists@julius-net.net>]

Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de> writes:

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

True.  But, if it works with aptitude that's better than nothing.

>
> 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.

I think aptitude uses /var/lib/apt/lists/*Packages to determine
dependencies.  How else would it know about them for packages that are
not installed.  It would need to consult *Sources to find out
build-depends.  This should not be too hard. 

>
> 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.

I don't think you really want to duplicate all source packages.  You
could have a post-install script that actually gets the source.

Matthias