Joe Smith wrote:
I wonder why nobody did implement that feature before. I imagine (without knowing much about APT's internals), the pseudocode would look like that:- install command gets the list - if the package does not exist in the cache and the given string is a file, then: - read the metadata of this package - creating a virtual sources set containing that package and inject it somewhere in APTs graph representation. The access method would be "file:", and it should get the highest possible priority (at least higher than any seen priority) - install the prerequisites and then the package with the usual methods fiwould it not be simpler to have have apt just ask dpkg what the dependencies of the passed .deb are and then install the dependencies (and their dependecies) and then just pass the deb directly to dpkg?I see no need to create a virtual sources set or worry about priorities as the next time the apt is run the package will be seen as 'obsolete or locally created' (unless it exists in the repository), and therefore would use whatever priority apt gives such packages. But then again this might be too mutch of a kluge.
I agree. I think that there should be a way to use apt to install a .deb with automatic dependency handling (in fact when I first began using debian I tried several times to install a .deb using apt). I don't know why this functionality was never written. It seems to be fairly trivial. Perhaps there were some reasons that precluded this feature? Benjamin
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