Re: [RFC] DEP-6: Meta-Package debian/control field
Besides sane handling of metapackages we should also think about marking
transitional packages in some way.
This would enable higher level tools like apt to mark them as
automatically installed and thus get rid of useless packages if no other
package depends on them. The dependencies of these transitional packages
would be marked as manually installed if the transitional package was
marked as manually installed.
deborphan tries to detect such packages by checking if a short
description contains the words "dummy" or "transitional". This hack is
ok for deborphan but should not be adopted by apt.
On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 07:52:22AM -0800, Steve Langasek wrote:
> This could be done with special handling of 'Section: metapackages',
> or by adding a new 'Metapackage: yes' field (as I think some would
> prefer based on comments on IRC).
Instead of adding various new fields we could use debtags for
non-essential information to be used by higher level packaging tools,
e.g. metapackages or transitional packages.
Carsten
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