Joerg Jaspert <jo...@ganneff.de> writes:
> metapackages, which is for metapackages so that apt can do special
> handling on them.
On IRC Joerg mentioned that transitional packages could/should also go
to the metapackages section.
The reasoning being that both metapackages and transitional packages
should have their dependencies marked as non-automatic so they don't get
removed when the top package is removed.
I think mixing the two types of packages would be a mistake as one wants
quite a different behaviour from them:
metapackages: keep them installed
transitional: remove after upgrade once nothing depends on it
So maybe there should be a "transitional" section to keep the two types
of packages apart. If there are seconds to this please someone open a
bug about it.
Personally I'm also not quite sure about the validity of marking all
dependencies of metapackages non-automatic. As mentioned in the
bugreport what happens if I want to remove gnome and install something
else? Then I have to manually remove all the dependencies of gnome.
I think dependencies of metapackages should be left as automatic but
frontends should ask wether to turn them all to non-automatic when the
meta package is selected for removal. So at removal time one would get
the choice of keeping all/some or removing them all. This could also
only ask if the metapackage was non-automatic.
Transitional packages on the other hand should just be removed with
their dependencies set to the same state the transitional package was in
(automatic -> leave them alone, non-automatic -> set them
non-automatic).
MfG
Goswin
PS: shouldn't frontends use the Tag: role::metapackage, special::meta?
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