On Thu, Jun 23, 2005 at 10:47:00AM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote: > > What, 239 packages out of some 16000 total? What exactly is > the problem? This is a miniscule number, and the disk requirements > for a dummy package is negligible. Now, novice users can possibly be (...)
I guess your count is based on 'apt-cache search dummy'. Sorry, unfortunately that will not provide you with a full list for several reasons: 1.- there are packages that include 'dummy' in their description which are not provided for transitional reasons (i.e. java-common) 2.- there are packages labeled as dummy that are in fact used to track versioned packages (i.e. libapache-mod-python). Users should not remove these, they are not transitional packages either. 3.- there are dummy packages which do not use 'dummy' in their description but use something else instead (look at zope-tinytable or try searching for 'transitional'). One of the main problems looking for these packages is that there is no standard _description_ for them. That makes it difficult for us to find and clean them between releases [1] and for system administrators to find which ones are present in their system and remove them after an upgrade. Regards Javier [1] I did a 'dummy' hunt before sarge which resulted in some dummy packages being removed from sarge which were created to ease potato->woody upgrades!
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