Bug#513254: Expose pin information to client code.
Package: libapt-pkg-dev
Version: 0.7.20.1
Severity: wishlist
By way of explanation, I (as a frontend author) would like to support
two extra functions:
(1) interactively viewing and editing the pins file.
(2) examining the priorities of versions and providing the reasons
for those priorities.
Right now the pin structure is a protected member of pkgPolicy.
It would be useful if frontends had direct access to the pin structure
and the list of configured pins. Right now the only hook for that is
CreatePin; I don't see any way of reading the list of pins or modifying
or deleting pins.
It would be nice if, at the very least, users of the API could step
over the list of pins without having to do a hack like deriving from
pkgPolicy and providing a public typedef for Pin and a public accessor
for the various pin structures (thus also having to deal with the
complexities of how pkgPolicy stores pins). I think that an "id" field
on pins that would be used to uniquely refer to a pin (e.g., for
deletion or update) would be necessary.
A lesser step that would fill some needs that I have would be a
routine that returns the set of pins that apply to a version, rather
than the ability to view all pins -- that's not enough for a pin
editor, but it is enough to describe why a version is getting picked.
Daniel
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 5.0
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-1-686 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Versions of packages libapt-pkg-dev depends on:
ii apt [libapt-pkg-libc6.7-6-4.6 0.7.20.1 Advanced front-end for dpkg
ii apt-utils 0.7.20.1 APT utility programs
libapt-pkg-dev recommends no packages.
libapt-pkg-dev suggests no packages.
-- no debconf information
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