On Wed, Mar 13, 2024 at 09:44:02AM +0100, Miguel Angel Rojas wrote: > > If "apt upgrade" is saying that it removes packages, that is a bug, yes. > > @david: it is not a bug, apparently.
Yeah, but for different reasons. I know that exists & even use it frequently… but its two different things for me as the modifiers are from the user and as such always correct and intended while what upgrade performs later on has restrictions applied (again from the user). Having the same restrictions that upgrade has also apply for the modifiers would make them less useful and in some sense be second guessing the user as they asked for this to happen… (modifiers btw is not a good word. I guess it was never documented so far partly as this is a rather advanced feature and mainly because naming things is hard) So, I said "apt upgrade" meaning exactly that, not "apt upgrade foo-". That could be interpreted in slightly different ways, but given how our other commands behave it seems most sensible to interpret it as: After the upgrade, foo is not installed, which if foo is currently installed means remove it. More frequently it will mean through that foo should not be part of the solution (as in, it is e.g. a non-pick for resolving an or-dependency, so e.g. not installed as a NEW package). An alternative interpretation could have been: Do upgrade all but foo, but that can be achieved differently (e.g. foo/now) and would be rather specific for upgrade, while behaving differently elsewhere. And yes, "apt upgrade foo" can lead to bar being removed, which seems surprising at first, but that depends on the foo. If its e.g. exim vs postfix that is clear for the user based on what those packages represent. I just tried, "--no-remove" catches that, it also catches "foo-" through which I am not super-happy about and I think we have a bug report for open… but I could see that go either way and in any case that leads us further away from the initial topic. > In the meantime, while the documentation is modified, can some developer > provide some explanation to the current "apt upgrade" behaviour? (*) […] > (*) I'm a bit confused because I don't know which of the people involved in > this bug are actually a developer of the apt package ;) Well, does it really matter who is and who isn't? I suppose we could have a borderline philosophical discussion about what makes someone an APT developer given this is a muddily self-defined non-delegated accumulation of people who for some reason feel some sort of responsibility for and/or derive enjoyment from it; like most other teams in Debian. We could look at uploaders, changelog entries, commit history or access right on e.g. salsa… but if either of those provide the full picture? Anyway, I suppose for practical proposes you can think of Julian and me as main APT developers in terms of who do the most and as such stir it in recentish years. If you are asking if that behaviour was added intentionally: https://salsa.debian.org/apt-team/apt/-/commit/d8a8f9d7f01c75a7bbad7a488bf359a94291d1de That said, you can be an APT developer, too: Propose the documentation text you had hoped to find in the first place. Nobody is born an APT developer, they are chosen based on their patch offerings… 😉 Best regards David Kalnischkies
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