Bug#837970: Apt simulation improvements

[Kevin Mills <kevin.mills226@gmail.com>]

My request is more general than that. The idea is that you could chain *any* apt commands together as a single simulation. Such as, for example, a sequence consisting of:

add-apt-repository -y ppa:footeam/foo

apt -y update

apt -y upgrade

apt -y install foo bar

However, install with "+" or "-" does solve my immediate problem, so thank you for that, but I still think allowing arbitrarily complex simulations would be a good idea, assuming it's not prohibitively difficult to implement.

On Fri, Sep 16, 2016 at 3:21 AM, David Kalnischkies <david@kalnischkies.de> wrote:

On Thu, Sep 15, 2016 at 10:06:55PM -0400, Kevin Mills wrote:
> It should be possible to continue a simulation through several invocations
> of apt. As it is, you can only do a simulation of one thing; you can't
> simulate, for example, installing package X and removing package Y, only
> one or the other.

You can install & remove packages at the same time. All "apt install" or
"apt remove" does is set a default for unqualified package names. If you
want to install a package append a '+' to its name, if you want it
removed append a '-'.

e.g.: apt install -s awesome apt-doc+ dpkg-dev-

This installs (or upgrades) 'awesome' and 'apt-doc' and removes
'dpkg-dev'.


Is that what you are asking for?


Best regards

David Kalnischkies