On Sun, Apr 23, 2006 at 11:20:04AM -0700, Mike Bird wrote: > On Sun, 2006-04-23 at 11:06, Florian Weimer wrote: > > > Ideally, tasksel would be changed to use the dependencies of > > > any meta package WITHOUT installing the meta package. > > > > This doesn't address the issues with testing migration at all. > > Maybe I'm a slow learner. How does adding a package with a few > hundred unversioned dependencies and no reverse dependencies > slow down anything but itself?
Hmmm... I'm not an expert but I think it goes like this: - metapackage in 'testing' which (unversioned) depends: A and B (in testing A, version 1, and B, version 1, get along together) - The maintainers decide that, for sid, A will have new functionality that makes it replace B. So, in sid, A (v2) conflicts: with B (v1) In this situation, unless the metapackage is updated to reflect that change then A could not get into testing without breaking the metapackage (and the migration scripts would prevent that unless forced^Whinted to do so). If the maintainers managing the packages and meta-packages don't sync their work there is going to be breakage because of the later. The above is a simple example but things can easily get more complicated with metapackages that depend on *lots* of other packages. Users end up having to remove the meta-package (either manually, or because apt says so), losing the benefits they provide. Just my 2c Javier
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