On Sun, 2008-08-31 at 19:08 +0100, Mark Hobley wrote: > Package: general > Severity: wishlist > > > There is an annoying flaw in the design of the Debian package management > system, which means that packages cannot be partially installed.
Umm, yes they can actually. Emdebian uses this functionality all the time. You have a choice of unpacking and running the preinst maintainer scripts or you can extract the package to a local directory or you can view the contents of the package with dpkg -c, dpkg -I or deb-gview, there are quite a few methods. > For any particular package, the full set of binary components, optional > documentation, and unused foreign language support files will be installed > by the package management system. This is dpkg filtering which is also being implemented - I looked at a version at DebConf7 due to needs within Emdebian and it has since been enhanced and being implemented in dpkg. > This flaw also means that components of bundled packages, such as the > coreutils suite cannot be individually selected or omitted. This is > particularly annoying if the system installer wants to replace one of > the components with a customized version. Filtering would support that too. > A fix would be to make it possible to select individual files for > installation from within a package. > > Other work includes splitting packages into daughter packages, the > parent package being dependent on all daughters, but allowing the option > of just selecting individual daughter packages, Currently, that means rebuilding the packages - Emdebian is doing that too. > Each stand alone binary file should be individually packaged, rather > than bundled with other stand alone binary files. Umm, we have 20,000 packages - that could push us to 2 million overnight. I don't think ftp-master would accept that. > It is policy that internationalized (non-english) components are > packaged separately to the core package. For example, a package foobar, > would have its french documentation in a separate foobar-fr package. TDebs will implement this - support is planned in the infrastructure for Lenny+1 and in packages for Lenny+2 > Packages should not install cruft on the system. This means that a > package should not install a foreign language file, unless the system > has been explicitly configured to support that foreign language. A combination of dpkg filtering, an Emdebian TDeb utility to be merged into apt and other infrastructure support is already planned for this scenario. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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