[Aptitude-devel] Bug#816781: Bug#816781: aptitude: Can not cancel pending upgrade actions

[Cesare Leonardi]

On 30/05/2017 22:42, Axel Beckert wrote:
>>> So maybe we should be a little bit more verbose with the short
>>> description in the menu or maybe even split "Cancel pending actions"
>>> into two separate menu entries:
>>>
>>> * Cancel pending actions of this session
>>> * Cancel all pending actions
>>>
>>> or similar.
>>
>> It will be wonderful to have two entries, because "Cancel all
>> pending actions" is quite self explanatory, will match the previous
>> behaviour
>
> I couldn't remember that we changed that, but this change was indeed a
> bugfix in 0.7.6 from February 2016:
>
>       * [curses] "Cancel pending actions" now reloads the cache (roughly
>         equivalent to restarting the program), rather than marking all packages
>         as "keep" plus ruining all auto-installed flags and holds
>         (Closes: #537735, #576319)

Hi Axel, maybe I misunderstood the part where you talked about splitting 
"Cancel pending actions": when you said "Cancel all pending actions", 
you meant also from previous sessions, wasn't it? In this case, from a 
user point of view, it would almost match the previous behaviour, at 
least for the fact that there wasn't a concept of session for that command.
That's what I wanted to say.

However, if it weren't so late in the release cycle, I believe that the 
best solution would be the one exposed by Drew Parsons, because I fear 
that who will upgrade from 8 to 9 might find this change surprising.
I hope I'm wrong.

Post-Stretch: how about replacing "Cancel pending actions" with "Keep 
all" or "Keep all pending", that does exactly what "Keep" does but for 
all packages waiting for install/upgrade/remove/purge? And it would do 
the same of the corresponding command line option.

Cesare.