[Soc-coordination] GSoC idea: aptitude package manager

[Sam Lidder]

First of all, thanks for taking the time out of your schedule to clear
things up for me. It makes sense that modifications to aptitude would
also have to be synchronized with the underlying library.


> But your idea seems to have an interesting spin to it non-the-less:
> Am i understand you right, that you want something like a dummy
> package holding these auto-installed build-deps back as long as
> this dummy is installed?

I was actually thinking that the feature would just access the same
information that 'apt-cache showsrc' uses to list a package's build
dependencies, and then remove/purge those. But I guess a virtual package
would make more sense in the event that the build dependencies are
modified after the user has installed them (assuming the virtual package
would contain a snapshot of the build dependencies at the time of
installation and not be updated).

I tried diving into aptitude's source (and apt's for comparison) to get
an overview of the codebase structure but didn't too far as I've also
been a bit busy with exams. Would libapt-pkg-dev be a better place to
start?


> The bug-number is wrong, but i can imagine whats written there.

Woops, meant to post this link; must've truncated the last digit in
excitement: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=468897. But
regardless, I see where you're coming from in regards to why it might be
a better idea to leave the feature out of aptitude.


Thanks for the info, cleared up a lot of questions I had.

Regards,
Sam Lidder