[Aptitude-devel] Bug#833310: Bug#833310: option to make "forget new" non-interactive as before

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

2016-08-06 12:52 Axel Beckert:
>Hi Manuel,
>
>Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo wrote:
>> >Since "forget new" became interactive the new aptitude behaves
>> >differently than aptitude in older versions. This makes managing
>> >a set of hosts in parallel via tools like "cssh" pretty painful.
>> >Some host require an additional confirmation step (for a trivial
>> >operation).
>[...]
>> If it's the curses interface, instead of 'f' you just have to press
>> (inject?) 'f+Enter', so for me it's quite trivial and I don't think
>> that you mean this case.
>
>I'm very sure that's exactly the case he meant.
>
>Imagine the following: Use cssh. mssh, pconsole, tmux or any other
>tool which multiplexes keyboard input onto multiple machines via SSH:
>
>One machine is running Testing and one machine Unstable.
>
>Now you type "aptitude<Enter><down>[" and you see on both machines the
>opened branch of the New Packages list. Now you press "f" and one
>machine already forgot the New Packages list while the other still
>needs you to press "<Enter>". But if you press "<Enter>" on both, the
>Testing machine opens one level of the Upgradable Packages list
>instead.
>
>Does this help you to understand what Harald wants?

Yes, it does, thanks.

However, it's strange for me to imagine administering systems in
different distributions with the input cloned, or which are not almost
100% in sync in terms of packages available, etc.

Some basic keys might work, but as soon as one has to decide between
different upgrade solutions or similar cases, things can get wrong very
quickly.  Would be probably easier to use the command line in that case
(update lists && upgrade), and interactive when things get complicated.
But well, I guess that people do these things.


Also, for me it's hard to imagine why one would bother with "New" for
systems that one doesn't have a personal interest in monitoring very
closely, and receives new packages continuously like unstable (e.g. main
development system only).

Either I would never use forget-new in that case, or perhaps will always
forget new from the command line... or better yet use
"Aptitude::Forget-New-On-Update" to never have to bother with doing this
by hand every time that I update the lists.


... In any case, for the purpose of the bug, I suppose that the issue
will sort itself as soon as the version in unstable moves to testing,
which hopefully will be Real Soon Now (TM).


Cheers.
-- 
Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montezelo at gmail.com>