Control: tags -1 + wontfix
Hi,
2005-07-26 23:38 Brian Kimball:
Package: aptitude
Version: 0.2.15.9-3
Severity: wishlist
Hi again. I'm finally purging my aptitude thoughts. One more to go
after this. :-)
I find %r to be very useful in providing at-a-glance information as to
whether I need a package installed or not, especially when I don't know
much and don't particularly want to know much about a package.
%r doesn't quite provide the whole picture though: it doesn't tell me
at-a-glance if any other packages recommend or suggest a package, so
when I'm cleaning out unwanted packages I often find myself constantly
checking their reverse-dependency listings before hitting the purge
button. This process can get pretty tedious, especially when confronted
with the long reverse-dependency listings that I addressed in my other
wishlist.
If we had similar escapes for reverse-recommends and reverse-suggests we
would all be able to see immediately just how many other packages find
a particular package useful. No longer would we need to enter a new
screen for each and every package. Just scrolling through the package
listing would be enough.
Similar as for #320092, there doesn't seem to be much reason with recent
versions of aptitude to continuously monitor rev-dep lists for the
purpose of removing packages, nowadays the "auto-installed" packages
functionality should serve this purpose.
You already have a lot of escapes already, so maybe %r could change to
displaying 5 characters: d/r/s. Those wishing to only see actual
reverse depends can limit the width to 1 character.
What do you think?
I think that in general this is a very thorny area.
For example, one would expect that this count behaves correctly with
"automatically install recommends" or "automatically install suggests"
and "recommended-important" and "suggests-important" and several other
variations of the options, and that if unmarking some of these options
later, that the new situation is taking all that into account. That's a
quite big amount of combinations, and it's probably difficult to match
the expectations of all people in this regard.
Worse is the situation with provided (virtual) packages. Should the
rev-depends of all provided packages be counted? What if a rev-dep
depends on multiple provided packages of a single package, should it be
counted only once or every time? If we decide to count only one in the
previous case, what if v1 of rev-dep (fantastic_1.0) depends on provided
package 1 (e.g. libfantastic-abi-1), and v2 of the same rev-dep depends
on another provided package of the current package
(e.g. libfantastic-abi-2) -- should we count it twice in this case?
Furthermore, how do we count alternatives, and what if virtual packages
are involved? Because if the package in question is www-browser or
mail-user-agent and several packages providing it are installed, or the
rev-dep depends on (pkga|pkgb) and both are installed, one can uninstall
the package being reviewed anyway.
So all of these questions (and probably many more) have to be considered
when implementing this, it's not a simple question of traversing a graph
and counting, that's probably why the doc mentions explicitly: "Outputs
the approximate number of installed packages which depend upon the
package."
2005-07-28 16:57 Daniel Burrows:
On Tuesday 26 July 2005 03:38 pm, Brian Kimball wrote:
You already have a lot of escapes already, so maybe %r could change to
displaying 5 characters: d/r/s. Those wishing to only see actual
reverse depends can limit the width to 1 character.
What do you think?
If I did this, I'd probably resolve the problem by extending the syntax of
format codes, similarly to how I extended matchers. For instance,
%(r:Recommends)
I tend to think, though, that the pattern and format languages are getting a
little too complicated, and rather than adding lots of variations on their
codes for all sorts of obscure situations, I'd rather just add hooks into a
real programming language such as Python...although, of course, it's a lot
easier to hack up individual special-case fixes to each situation as it comes
up. :P
Overall, and again as with #320092, the request was sitting for more
than a decade with no follow-up or intention to implement it, or even
seconding, and I don't consider that has a high priority either.
Much less to implement hooks to other programming languages.
So marking it as +wontfix.
--
Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <[email protected]>
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