Matt Zimmerman wrote: > Yet more fallout from #113616. :-/ > > Is it really a problem to use a pipe to apt-cache dumpavail for this? Sure, > it's somewhat slower than reading the available file, but it still takes > less than a second on a relatively modest system. It's not as if users will > run tasksel frequently. > > This wouldn't be too hard to implement, but isn't it the wrong thing to have > apt overwrite dpkg's information without dpkg asking? If you want the > information from apt instead, it's pretty easy to ask apt for it. The faqs I referred to are "why does dpkg -p show arbitrarily outdated information". Now, I suppose that if tasksel only used apt-cache in a pipe, then base-config could avoid running dselect update at all, and then dpkg -p would show nothing. Personally though, I like having dpkg -p available, and I am well aware of what Jason brought up, and don't care about it (I don't use pinning; if I use /release in apt it's transient). So even if we end up not using this for tasksel I would like to be able to set it up myself. However, since debian as shipped does not use pinning by default at all anyway[1], I think that Jason's concerns are overblown. It's easy enough to change documentation of pinning to note that after setting up pinning, dpkg -p will be out of touch with reality. After all, after setting up pinning, dselect is already pretty out of touch with reality itself, and this has not seemed to greatly confuse the small group of users who use pinning. -- see shy jo [1] barring the default experimental stuff
Attachment:
pgpgPkqnMYHD1.pgp
Description: PGP signature