Leandro Dutra wrote:
>
> > > > The developers of dpkg could do something like add a 'package
> > > grouping'
> > > > feature that lets newcomers (especially newbies to X11) understand the
> > > > relationship between packages.
> >
> > Is this a documentation issue? Maybe there is a requirement for a document
> explaining the general
> > layout of the packages. The grouping of packages seems to be ok.
>
> No, I think the original poster thought of a kind of hierarchical
> grouping where each program/function would be the root of a little tree
> detailing all its packages... something like
>
> X-+-xbase
> |
> +-xservers
> |
> +-xfonts
>
Yes, this is what I was thinking of. Right now the only way to
'associate' packages with one another, besides the section name, is to
use a common prefix in the name so they show up together in the same
place in dselect's screen. Imagine a user looking at the huge list of
packages (in X11 section) that start with 'x'. Yes, the dependencies
will auto-select most of the necessary packages if one is picked by the
user, but when I did this by picking xbase, I believe 'xterm' never got
auto-selected, nor is the user made aware of other 'significantly
related' packages like the other xfont and xserver packages. How would
a new user with little experience with Unix/X11 know he needs 'xterm'?
There is one other 'association' issue that is getting worse. Imagine
selecting the gnome package suite. When I did this recently, I ended up
with more than *30* packages being selected for gnome support. Now
suppose the user wants to remove gnome to try out KDE, for example (lets
just assume they are mutually exclusive). There is no reasonable way
for this user to figure out which installed packages were installed for
gnome. I guess what I'm suggesting is that the packages need to
'remember' *why* they were selected, by the user, or auto-selected
because of dependency requirements on a given package. When the user
goes to delete gnome from his system, the other packages that were
installed only because of dependencies, can 'inform' the user, somehow,
that they are no longer needed.
P.S., I've used X11 and GNOME as examples. The 'problem' though is
more generic; I'm not deliberately picking on X11/GNOME.
> Anyway, this is a thread that could (should) be in the debian-devel
> group...
>
> There is the apt package in development, all such new features
> probably should be implemented in apt.
>
> Leandro Guimaraens Faria Corcete Dutra
> Amdocs Brasil Ltda
>
--
Ed C.
