package aptitude
severity 328616 normal
severity 199887 normal
merge 328616 199887
retitle 328616 Add "revision" information to the dpkg database?
thanks
The difficult problem here is that while the correct thing to do is to
let the last modification to the dpkg database win, there's no foolproof
way to know what the last modification was. For instance,
(1) user marks package P "to be removed" in aptitude.
(2) user purges package P with dpkg.
(3) user changes his mind and re-installs P with dpkg.
Obviously P should end up in the "installed, to be kept" state.
But unless aptitude is run between steps 2 and 3, there's no possible
way for it to know that P has been modified (without dreadful and
fragile hacks like checking file timestamps); as far as the status file
says, its state has remained unchanged since the last aptitude run.
I think the best way to deal with this is for dpkg to keep some sort
of token on each package that identifies the last change to it. There
doesn't necessarily need to be any other semantic information attached
to it (although, eg, timestamp might actually be useful); it just needs
to change each time the package state changes.
In addition to helping aptitude out, this would probably be useful for
anything else that wants to keep an eye on how the status db has changed
over time; if a timestamp is defined to be part of the unique token,
it might also be useful for system administrators who want to find out
when a package was last changed.
Thanks,
Daniel
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