> in order to exactely mimic the output of deboostrap, we would like to > be able to specify the priority/priorities for packages that get > installed automatically.
Support for handling Required is already available, as is Recommends. The only other usable priority would seem to be "important". > of course, one could parse packages.gz and hand over the list of > packages to multistrap, however, it would be much nicer to just add > 'Important' to the list of priorities that should be considered and > let multistrap do all the work. I've looked at (and discounted) the idea of a Suggest: dctrl-tools and using grep-available for these reasons: 0: grep-available can work with the available list in the mutlistrap but only after the list of available packages has been written out by dpkg, i.e. after the initial packages have been downloaded *and installed* in the multistrap. 1: debootstrap relies on wget and then parsing the Packages file but this is heavily reliant on there only being a single Packages file... which is kinda the reason why multistrap exists. 2: grep-available by default would use the main system which could easily result in a different list of packages to the repositories to be used in the multistrap. 3: The Packages files would be downloaded by apt but identifying the individual files for per-repository support means relying on current apt behaviour not changing in the future and apt has a habit of changing just such things, including during a release freeze. Supporting changes in multistrap would simply not get the same priority to be fixed during just such a freeze. > In order to suggest a patch, I'd like to know, if you would prefere to > have such an option as a global one, or as a per repository one. So per-repository would not work with grep-available, nor with the only realistic option for parsing the Packages files themselves. So I propose to use the existing omit-required code in multistrap in reverse to identify those packages with Priority: important at the same time. This also asserts that Priority: required cannot be omitted if Priority: important are to be included. This means that all downloaded Packages files in the multistrap are combined into a single hash (to ensure uniqueness of package names) and then combined with the listed packages (if any). So 'important' support, like 'required' has to be global, specified in the General section. Naturally, important support must be off by default (i.e. the implicit value is 'false'). -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
pgpVrapQmqNmk.pgp
Description: PGP signature
