Bug#629617: apt: provide a way to run pkgInitConfig() that doesn't parse the default configuration files

[Raphaël Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org>]

Package: apt
Version: 0.8.14.1
Severity: wishlist

Hello,

I would like to use python-apt to manage several APT caches that are
completely unrelated to the system installation. This means I do not want
to parse the configuration files in /etc/apt unfortunately pkgInitConfig()
doesn't provide a way to skip those: "Dir::Etc" is always set to "etc/apt"
and the config files parsing is done in the same function.

I would like to just execute the part that sets sensible defaults to
the variables that are needed without parsing the user configuration
files.

One way to do it would be to not overwrite the various "Dir"
configuration items if they are pre-existing. That way I can point
them to directories without any configuration file.

Cheers,

-- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'proposed-updates'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (150, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.38-2-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=fr_FR.utf8, LC_CTYPE=fr_FR.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages apt depends on:
ii  debian-archive-keyring  2010.08.28       GnuPG archive keys of the Debian a
ii  gnupg                   1.4.11-3         GNU privacy guard - a free PGP rep
ii  libc6                   2.13-5           Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib
ii  libgcc1                 1:4.6.0-11       GCC support library
ii  libstdc++6              4.6.0-11         The GNU Standard C++ Library v3
ii  zlib1g                  1:1.2.3.4.dfsg-3 compression library - runtime

apt recommends no packages.

Versions of packages apt suggests:
pn  apt-doc                       <none>     (no description available)
ii  aptitude                      0.6.4-1    terminal-based package manager (te
ii  bzip2                         1.0.5-6    high-quality block-sorting file co
ii  dpkg-dev                      1.16.1     Debian package development tools
ii  lzma                          4.43-14    Compression method of 7z format in
ii  python-apt                    0.8.0      Python interface to libapt-pkg
ii  synaptic                      0.75.1     Graphical package manager

-- no debconf information