Re: Dependencies of metapackages
Le lundi 29 août 2011 à 16:40 +0100, Wolodja Wentland a écrit :
> is there a specific reason why metapackages depend rather then recommend
> packages they are meant to pull in?
There are several reasons for that - at least for the GNOME ones.
The first one is to guarantee that newly added packages are correctly
installed. APT does a lot better than it used to on this matter, but
there are still cases where it won’t install them.
Then, there is the problem that versioned Recommends are useless, while
we often want to guarantee that an optimal version combination is
installed. Worse: they are ignored.
To work around that we could use “Recommends: blah” and “Breaks: blah <<
3.0” but then the APT mechanisms will choose to remove blah instead of
keeping the metapackage at a lower version.
Finally, there’s the problem of keeping testing usable. You don’t want a
metapackage to migrate until all the packages it brings have also
migrated, otherwise testing systems could become unexpectedly unusable.
I think we could solve a lot of those problems by treating metapackages
specially in APT. For example, solutions removing such packages from the
system should be given a lower priority.
--
.''`. Josselin Mouette
: :' :
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