Re: Package unions (fwd)
Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
>
> We could do this sort of union thing fairly simply and get Bruce's
> "Install Group" things as well.
>
> Behan, if you like it and cook some kind of design up it can be done..
"Package unions" are nothing new. People have been asking for this
functionality for a long time. In fact that is one of the major things
I forgot to add to the original design of Deity! (although I meant to,
I just forgot).
The idea of using an empty package containing only dependencies to
implement this was rejected fairly early on. Although we could revisit
this topic if you wish.
My opinion is that this is a hack and uses the dependency system in a
way other than it was intended. I don't think that the initial list of
packages installed should continue to affect the user's choice down the
road. One big problem with this is that withing Deity currently, if you
install the "X11-workstation" package, it will pull in all the packages
that it depends on. If this package becomes a pain in the future for
the computer's user (i.e. they want to use sendmail instead of exim)
they may want to remove the "X11-workstation" package. As you can
probably guess, since all the main packages were installed because of
the original installation of this package, all those packages will then
be uninstalled. You can get around this with copious amounts of
meta-packages and requiring the "X11-workstation" package to never be
removed, but I think there is a better way. However, I am willing to be
persuaded otherwise if somebody has a good argument.
I am working on an idea more like dpkg --set-selections. A file lists a
set of pacakges that constitues a certain kind of debian setup (e.g.
minimum setup, server, X workstatio, etc.). The only thing this is used
for is the initial setup and it has no ongoing affect as to the packages
installed on the system.
What are other people's opinions and ideas?
Behan
--
Behan Webster mailto:behanw@verisim.com
+1-613-224-7547 http://www.verisim.com/
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