Bug#267877: APT should offer some regex filtering of Packages/Sources files.
Package: apt
Version: 0.5.27
Severity: wishlist
This is post Sarge wishlist :-)
The package file offered by Debian is growing. Aside from discussion to
tame this trend, the APT client side should offer some reasonable
protection so small CPU/memory resouce machine can be run using APT.
My wish is to offer some filtering function to the Package/Sources file
so the local copy of these files are manegeable.
I understand this may cause a lot of major user caused APT error worse
than apt_preferences but without these feature, how can we manage i486
in the days of "etch". (Debug feature is needed)
In order to make as generic solution, rule should be specified by some
regex expression designed for APT. Configuration file should be like
more like program (but top to down 1 pass no loop for speed). Some
thing like:
include Package =~ ".*-doc$"
include Priority =~ "important"
if Priority =~ ( "Optional" | "Extra" )
exclude Section kde
else
include Section kde
fi
It will be burden for reading Package files but for stable archive, once
parsed and filterd, local Packages copy can be quite small and will be
quite fast to check dependencies.
I expect shell script equivalent of set -e and set -x will be nice with
some loging feature.
Osamu
PS: I once filed similar wishlist to aptitude but he indicated that is
not the place to solve this kind of issue. Since freeze is coming, I
thought it is good time to think about post-release for APT.
-- Package-specific info:
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.7-1-686
Locale: LANG=en_US.ISO-8859-1, LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1
Versions of packages apt depends on:
ii libc6 2.3.2.ds1-16 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii libgcc1 1:3.4.1-5 GCC support library
ii libstdc++5 1:3.3.4-7 The GNU Standard C++ Library v3
-- no debconf information
--
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Osamu Aoki <osamu@debian.org> Brussels Belgium, GPG-key: A8061F32
.''`. Debian Reference: post-installation user's guide for non-developers
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`. `' "Our Priorities are Our Users and Free Software" --- Social Contract
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