We are attempting to use the debian package system to streamline the process of setting up the operating system for our software developers and robotics research platforms.
We have kind of a unique environment in that many of the (somewhat naive) system users have root-access for installing new packages on an as-needed basis, but the development environment itself has some specific requirements. For example, we require libboost1.37-dev over libboost-dev. I have create a trivial deb called "ros-conflicts" which just explicitly conflicts with the packages we need to avoid. Unfortunately, when users are doing large apt-get installs, they will just blindly hit "yes" without thoroughly inspecting the list of packages which may be removed, putting their system in an unusable (from a development standpoint) state. My initial workaround was to just add "Essential: yes" to the ros-conficts control file so that now users get a much more serious warning when they try to install a package that conflicts with it. However, this feels like a misuse of "essential." Is there a preferred way to present an appropriate warning to people when a particularly important package is about to be removed? Thanks, --Jeremy Leibs -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-mentors-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
