Re: Hiding library packages from apt searches by default? (was: Re: Worthless node-* package descriptions in ITPs)
On Fri, Jan 06, 2017 at 10:01:38AM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 9:32 PM, Christian Seiler wrote:
>
> > Could we maybe hide library packages from apt searches by default?
>
> This is going to have unintended consequences; for example, if we base
> it on Debian Section fields, library source packages that build a
> binary package containing tools, that are (incorrectly) put into the
> libs section, will not be found by users.
If ever something like this does go through, would it be possible to
limit it to UIDs != 0? Eg: Hiding lib packages would be limited to
'apt-cache search' called as a non-root user without using sudo.
> > I think most users don't care about libraries in any language (be it
> > Perl, C, JS, Python, ...), but only care about software they
> > use directly. And developers that do care about libraries could pass
> > a flag to APT to say "yeah, please show me all packages that match
> > this". And maybe even indicated how many library packages were not
> > shown in the default search results?
>
> How would you propose to implement that? apt currently doesn't have
> enough metadata about packages to say if they are end-user tools or
> not, and it depends on the user which tools are acceptable. For
> example; some folks can deal with the command-line but the majority of
> humanity cannot, some folks dislike particular GUI toolkits, etc.
Isn't this something the "GNOME Software" application addresses?
Additionally, thought I'm at least two years out of date with
packagekit news/status/frustrations, I wonder if it already has one
half of a distro-agnostic method to implement this...
Cheers,
Nicholas
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