New 'Meta-Package' tag for the control file
Hi,
I am working on converting the tasks and profiles from the base
installation into ordinary packages.
This will make the thing easier to manage, and offer these packages
also for later installation.
The packages constructing a profile will be pulled by a depends line
in the task package, and by using apt-get (or dselect), these will
pull the needed libs etc as well.
One problem is, that if such a task package is installed, one can't
easily override the selection or remove certain packages - one has to
remove the task package first.
Jason said that he can enhance apt to make this possible:
It would be better to give the package itself a 'task' flag which
would prevent APT from ever installing it, but would allow it to go
through and select it's dependencies for installation.
For some time the netscape packages have used a similar scheme. They
use the tag 'Meta-Package: yes' to indicate that they are a 'task'
package.
If you can get approval of the policy group then I can add a feature
like this for you.
So I am asking for this approval. This doesn't interfere with things,
the standard way with dselect as described by me still works, but one
can use apt-get to install the tasks/profiles and still allow to
remove parts of it later without any hassle.
There are task-style packages already present in the distribution, and
I belive we need more, as the distributions grows and becomes more
difficult to handle for the users.
With this flag, descriptions like
This package has NO files. It only depends on other packages. Once
you install this, and all the packages it depends on, you can remove
it, without loosing any functionality.
(netscape-smotif-408) can be avoided.
So please second this and get it through the policy process fast, so
it can be used for the potato release already.
Ciao,
Martin
[Please Cc: me, I am not subscribed to -policy]
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