Bug#503215: apt-get: provide a way to ignore nonexistent packages

[David Madore <david.madore@ens.fr>]

Package: apt
Version: 0.7.14+b1
Severity: wishlist

It would be nice to have an option --ignore-nonexistent to instruct
apt-get to emit a non-fatal warning if any nonexistent packages are
requested (on install, remove, etc.) rather than terminating with an
error.  E.g., "apt-get install --ignore-nonexistent dpkg blurb" would
just turn "Couldn't find package blurb" into a warning rather than an
error.

The reason this would be useful is that sometimes one wishes to
install huge lists of packages (e.g., copied from another machine's
output of dpkg -l) from which various packages may have been removed.
When installing a list of over 2000 packages from which perhaps 100
are nonexistent, it is a pain to have to restart 100 times apt-get,
each time removing *one* offending package.

So a --ignore-nonexistent option would be hugely useful.

This is, of course, totally unrelated to --ignore-missing.

-- 
     David A. Madore
    (david.madore@ens.fr,
     http://www.madore.org/~david/ )