Package: apt
Version: 1.8.4
Severity: wishlist
Dear Maintainer,
Thank you very much for helping keep Debian's
admin tools so cool!
It seems to me that managing software complexity
is becoming more important as Debian acquires more
packages.
The main reason I'm writing is to humbly suggest a
new feature to apt, apt-get and/or aptitude.
It would let users specify how deeply into a
packages dependency tree to upgrade dependencies
to their current versions.
My understanding is the current policy is to
upgrade the named package to its current version,
and only its dependencies if their installed
versions do not happen to satisfy the named
package's dependency.
For example
"$ aptitude upgrade sagemath
failed to upgrade its dependency on the cython3
package to the latest version available in
unstable, 0.29.14-0.1+b1.
sagemath's dependency says ">= 0.29.1" is good
enough, and 0.29.2-2 was installed.
I humbly suggest added a cool new option: "-dl <levels>"
where <levels> is a number specifying how deeply
into the named package's dependency tree to
upgrade dependencies to the currently available
version.
I suppose it may also accept a key word like "max"
or "all" to freshen the whole dependency tree.
I can imagine it helping
find bugs and/or
our understanding of software complexity.
Either way, Debian may get better.
So,
Kingsley
