[CC'ing the aptitude maintainer, mainly for the last paragraph.]
* Jeroen van Wolffelaar [Tue, 11 Oct 2005 22:00:22 +0200]:
> The main things that this thread shows me, is that it is *not* immediately
> clear to people not too familiar with Debian that the removal of the 'gnome'
> package will not have *any* effect on what actual software is actually
> installed
> on your system.
Do not forget, though, that with aptitude becoming the prefered tool
for package management (over plain apt-get), this is no longer true.
"aptitude install gnome" will mark all of its dependencies as "auto",
i.e. just installed because of a dependency. Which means that
"aptitude remove gnome" will want to remove all the dependencies _for
real_, unless they have been previously marked as "noauto" by hand.
If grasping the concept "removing a metapackage won't remove the
dependencies" was already difficult, grasping the whole auto/noauto
story can be... ykwim. Which, IMV, means that the user should not have
to care (much) about that.
* * *
As mentioned in [1], we've been considering switching to Recommends
for KDE metapackges, and mention in the description about the use of
--with-recommends.
What perhaps would be really best, though, would be some kind of
special handling for metapackages from aptitude et al. For example
(just the first I could think of), assume --with-recommends for
packages that have "Metapackage: yes". But this leaves the problem of
how to detect on upgrades if a recommended but not installed package
was uninstalled by the user, or newly introduced in the new version.
Daniel, do you have any comments on this? Is there a bug open about
handling of metapackages, or perhaps would be a good idea to open one?
Cheers,
--
Adeodato Simó
EM: asp16 [ykwim] alu.ua.es | PK: DA6AE621
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man.
-- George Bernard Shaw
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