On Tue, Oct 06, 2009 at 06:32:22PM +0200, Vincenzo Tibullo <enzo...@gmail.com>
was heard to say:
> 2009/10/5 Daniel Burrows <dburr...@debian.org>:
> > Internally, aptitude maps "~E" to testing the flags "essential" or
> >"important".
>
> I think this is not what user expect.
True. "important" is not a concept that's documented anywhere. The
only hesitation I have is that it's a change from aptitude's historical
behavior, and I don't want to modify that precipitously. However, I'll
probably do it eventually, since this is a very small corner case.
> >This is also what it does when testing whether to warn
> >the user about packages they're removing.
>
> >apt always turns on the
> >"important" flag for the package named "apt", regardless of whether
> >Essential is set to true for it.
>
> This is not clear to me: what do you mean by "apt always turns on the
> 'important' flag for the package named 'apt'"?
When apt is setting up its internal structures, it turns the Essential
flag on for packages with "Essential: yes", and it turns the Important
flag on for packages with "Important: yes" (of which there are none).
It also turns it on for packages named "apt", of which there is exactly
one (obviously :) ).
> > It's easy to change this behavior so that "important" is ignored
> >by ~E; I haven't really thought enough about this to figure out whether
> >that's the right thing to do. (it would certainly match the
> >documentation better)
>
> If the user really would to search for 'important' packages has
> another way to follow (needless to say: aptitude search
> '?priority("important")').
That will search for packages with "Priority: important", not for
packages that apt has set the Important flag on.
Daniel
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