[Aptitude-devel] Bug#401994: aptitude: Sort removed packaged at last

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

Control: tags -1 - confirmed + wontfix
Control: close -1


Hi,

2006-12-07 10:29 gerhard oettl:
>Package: aptitude
>Version: 0.4.3-1
>Severity: wishlist
>
>
>I know it is not possible to make it right for everyone, but i
>try to give a reason for my wish.
>
>In the non-visual mode (commandline-usage) i would prefere to
>have the packages that are to be removed sorted last (near the
>question if it is ok to continue). Because there are times with a
>long list of packages kept back if i only want to update some
>packages of many available upgradeable packages. Currently the
>packages that will be removed are sorted before the kept pack
>packages, so one have to scroll back to verify if there are not
>packages removed that are important and removing could be avoided
>by adding additional packages to the install command.
>
>So i think the following order best, at least for me ;-)
>
>1) kept back packages (i think them least important and the list
>   could be reviewed with a aptitude -s dist-upgrade)
>
>2) packages that will be updated (they normaly do little changes)
>
>3) additional added packages (change the system more)
>
>4) packages that will be removed. Having a wrong selection there
>   hurts most. Automatically removed packages in particular.
>
>With this order the "electric" changes are closest to the
>"continue" question and therefore best "at hand" or "in view".

I can agree with the reasoning above, however, after reviewing what apt
does (it does the same ordering as aptitude, roughly), and after many
years of established practice, I think that we shouldn't change this at
this point.

I haven't seen other requests asking for this and it doesn't have any
"seconds" in almost 10 years, so in principle is not a popular request
either.


Additionally, nowadays (maybe it was different at the time) in
operations installing or upgrading individual packages I think that
packages kept-back are not shown by default (unless they were part of
the request).  Packages to be upgraded are shown, and are shown after
REMOVED, though.

I think that the ordering depends on personal preferences, but possibly
also on the situation -- perhaps you don't care that obsolete or
automatically installed and removed packages (e.g. old libraries) are
removed, while you can care if a package that you want to upgrade is
kept-back because of dependency problems.


So sorry, but I am marking this as +wontfix, as well as closing it
because I don't see this changing in the foreseeable future.


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