Re: Transitional (dummy) packages considered silly

[Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org>]

On Sun, 20 Sep 2009, Pierre Habouzit wrote:
> So while I dismissed your idea at first thinking you wanted to make it a
> dpkg thing, now that I understand that you rather want it to be an /apt/
> one, it makes really more sense to me.

I also believe that it's something that would be nice to have.

> The point remains though that:
>   - apt
>   - dselect
>   - aptitude
>   - cupt
> must support that.

I wouldn't put dselect on a blocker list for this feature. All the apt
based tools should support it however (that also includes synaptic).

> Well, so, maybe you should try to talk to apt/aptitude/dselect/cupt
> guys to see what they think of the proposal :)

I would add the required support in dpkg/dpkg-dev to make the field
official if Apt maintainers were to implement some support of it.

However I wonder if we should not generalize this so that we can add
supplementary hints for package managers in the future... there might
other kinds of information that could be used in optimizing upgrade paths.

I know Ubuntu has their own upgrade tool (update-manager -d) precisely to
be able to drive the upgrade more finely (sort of automatization of the
order recommended in the release notes).

Apt-Hints: supersedes ...

Other possible hints:
- no-auto-remove: for kernels, modules, firmwares (currently a hack in
  apt-get)
- no-mark-auto: for metapackages so that the direct dependencies installed
  are not marked as automatically installed

I'm sure we can come up with other over time, so it might be nice to have
a generic solution right from the beginning.

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog