Compat Levels - A road towards better apt CLI evolution?
Summary from #debian-devel thoughts:
* The split in behaviour between apt(8) and apt-get(8) and it's
other dashed friends is confusing
* We want to be able to evolve the command-line interface, but
we also do not want to break existing scripts
* apt should not warn when stdout is redirected, that's annoying.
I think we can do better: Introduce compat levels, like
debhelper. The default compat level is the highest stable
one, scripts could declare another level by setting an option
or exporting APT_COMPAT or something.
Compat levels:
0: How apt-get and friends work
1: How apt(8) works
2: Like 1, but without the regular expression matching magic,
instead requiring a strict form of patterns (TBD)
I believe this would solve a lot of issues. We could also mark
even compat levels as LTS compat levels (we want to allow upgrading
between Debian and Ubuntu LTS releases), and keep the odd ones
for a shorter amount of time or something - for example, 0 is
the legacy scripting interface, it should be kept longer than 1.
Opinions welcome.
--
Debian Developer - deb.li/jak | jak-linux.org - free software dev
| Ubuntu Core Developer |
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