On Fri, Aug 27, 1999 at 10:08:25AM +0300, Paul Huygen wrote: > > I can imagine another philosophy for automatic package installing. I > am sure that many people (I myself for instance) have installed many > more packages than they actually use. For that case I can imagine a > utility that remembers for each package the latest occasion that it > has actually been used, and removes the package if it has not been > used for a specific time. Then, if a user asks for that package, the > utility re-installs the package from the deb file. In this way the > system maintainer keeps control on what is installed, what is > installable and what is not installed and the system is as mean and > lean as possible. On the other hand, I presume that it is very > complicated to write a program that tracks the actual use of each installed > debian package.
Paul -- such a system sort of exists -- the popularity contest package, which reports via email the most commonly used packages. I haven't a clue how that thing works, I haven't looked into its source code yet; however, I think you are absolutely right in one respect -- those seldom used packages, I installed because I thought they would be cool/useful/neat, whatever -- if I never use it, I must have forgotten about it. Something to email me a weekly basis the packages I *didn't* use, might be extremely helpful. Anyone care to hack apart the populatirty contest package to add this? :) (For the record, the idea of self-installing software works fine for office2000 -- most users don't come close to using the whole thing, but it still shows what is offered. There is an upper limit on what it can do however, and a full OS is just too big to try to pull that off. *I* would rather avoid the issue. It works fine for office 2000 since local user == root. On multi-user unix systems, as an administrator, I would hate for my machine to be auto-installing software because my users mistyped. As a single-user high performance system, normally if I need something, I can su to root and install it myself. It makes me think once in while if I need a package or not.. :) -- Seth Arnold | http://www.willamette.edu/~sarnold/ Hate spam? See http://maps.vix.com/rbl/ for help Hi! I'm a .signature virus! Copy me into your ~/.signature to help me spread!
