Re: A proposal to improve dselect
On Fri, 10 Jan 1997, Gertjan Klein wrote:
> In article <[🔎] 199701081756.JAA15270@tantale.fifi.org>,
> Philippe Troin <phil@fifi.org> wrote:
>
> > Not a bug. What you describe is pre-dependencies. It's a bit too long
> > to explain here, but you can find all the details in the Debian
> > policy manual.
> > Dpkg does the work right... so far.
>
> Interesting. I looked in /usr/doc/debian, and found no policy manual.
> I finally found a policy.html _directory_ in /usr/doc/dpkg; I read all
> the files in it and couldn't find "all the details" there... But perhaps
> there already is a misunderstanding, as you're talking about dpkg, and I
> was talking about dselect. (Or maybe I don't understand the interaction
> between the two). Dselect knows the dependancies between the packages it
> has to install, and should should present them to dpkg in the right
> order.
Depends doesn't mean that the package most be install first - that's what
pre-depends are for - it only means that's this package must be install
with the other one. Also, the package are supposed to be install easily
without pre-dependencies. According to the policy manual, Pre-depends
must *not* be use unless is it vital for the installation of the package.
If you encounter this kind of bugs, registered it to Debian and the
maintainer will had the Pre-Depends to its control file or, better way,
correct it's installation process to not Pre-Depends on any package other
then the base or Essential. The reason why this should be avoid is
because of the risk to see a vicious circle of pre-dependencies.
Dselect are still just a wrapper around dpkg and the methods script (as
described in the programmer manual). Must of the scripts (if not all) who
install the package use dpkg --recursive to install the package. It's the
simpler way of doing this. If you want, you can try to do it more efficiently
by parsing only already selected packages (removing all the "skipping
deselected package" - do 'dpkg --help | more' to find how you can get a list
of selected package) and/or adding installation of dependencies before
the depending package (watch out for package who depends on each other!).
If you're script work well, you can make a package with or submit it to
Ian for inclusion to the standard dselect distribution.
Don't give up and sorry for the long mail but I think this can be of
interest for the users (just looking for the size of this thread!).
Ciao!
Fab.
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