On Fri, Jan 06, 2017 at 10:01:38AM +0800, Paul Wise wrote: > On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 9:32 PM, Christian Seiler wrote: > > > Could we maybe hide library packages from apt searches by default? > > This is going to have unintended consequences; for example, if we base > it on Debian Section fields, library source packages that build a > binary package containing tools, that are (incorrectly) put into the > libs section, will not be found by users.
If ever something like this does go through, would it be possible to limit it to UIDs != 0? Eg: Hiding lib packages would be limited to 'apt-cache search' called as a non-root user without using sudo. > > I think most users don't care about libraries in any language (be it > > Perl, C, JS, Python, ...), but only care about software they > > use directly. And developers that do care about libraries could pass > > a flag to APT to say "yeah, please show me all packages that match > > this". And maybe even indicated how many library packages were not > > shown in the default search results? > > How would you propose to implement that? apt currently doesn't have > enough metadata about packages to say if they are end-user tools or > not, and it depends on the user which tools are acceptable. For > example; some folks can deal with the command-line but the majority of > humanity cannot, some folks dislike particular GUI toolkits, etc. Isn't this something the "GNOME Software" application addresses? Additionally, thought I'm at least two years out of date with packagekit news/status/frustrations, I wonder if it already has one half of a distro-agnostic method to implement this... Cheers, Nicholas
