On Jo, 12 iul 12, 15:46:05, Gergely Nagy wrote: > > X) Downgrade stuff to recommends > ================================ > > I do not consider this a solution, for reasons explained elsewhere, > where my main concern is that it breaks the assumption that installing a > platform (in this case, gnome) will install the whole thing, and it will > be available for my use at any time.
Well, it will, in all but unusual installations :) > With recommends, there's a fair chance that a distinctly related package > forces part of the platform off, and the package manager will happily > remove them. Once the breakage is fixed, it will not reinstall them. Could you please elaborate on that? The only thing I can think of that would force some packages to not be installed (or removed) is a Conflicts (or unsatisfiable Depends, but this shouldn't happen in stable). With Recommends you get a simple prompt that a specific package will be uninstalled and comparing the descriptions will probably give a hint to any user that those packages might conflict (assuming they don't look at the Conflicts). With Depends aptitude will suddenly want to remove a whole bunch of packages (that may or may not look related) and apt-get will suggest you to do this via autoremove. Then you have go hunting with apt-mark, yay! > This can be worked around by removing the auto-installed flag from those > parts of the platform that I want to keep at all times, but then what is > the use of Recommends, when I have to cherry pick anyway? I could just > skip installing the meta, the net effect is the same (except, that > without the meta, there are no expectations to break). Are you talking about testing or sid? > I still don't see the problem with installing a subset by hand. Advanced > users can script it, novices will only need to hand pick once. Done. 10 > minutes job. IMO the main problem is: # aptitude remove package Following packages will be removed: [Big list with 100+ packages] > Compare that to the hours wasted trying to figure out what forced part > of the platform off my system and when, during an unattended > upgrade.. Yes, I do those, because I want to trust the system doing the > right thing, and keeping stuff I installed intact and complete. Sorry, I thought we were talking about stable, why would something like that happen. Kind regards, Andrei -- Offtopic discussions among Debian users and developers: http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/d-community-offtopic
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