enhancing apt-get for meta packages

["Martin Bialasinski" <martin@internet-treff.uni-koeln.de>]

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, 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.

A possible solution is to enhance apt-get by a --task option, so that
apt-get --task install task-ftpserver task-webserver will pull the
dependancies as usual, and installs the packages, *but not* the
packages given at the command line.

Is this feasable, is there a design flow with this, and most
important, is such a change possible before we release?

Ciao,
	Martin