I've learned my lesson...<sigh>

[Alan DuBoff]

Joey Hess wrote:

> Well here's a hook. Mind you I haven't actually written it yet.
> 
> This is a library that is LD_PRELOAD'ed. It intercepts all calls to exec and
> open. It compares the filenames against a list of all files provided by all
> of debian. It links with libapt. When a nonexistent file that is part of
> debian is opened or execed, it apt-get installs the appropriate package. [1]
> 
> So with this in place, you install debian, then proceed about your business
> and get everything you ever refer to installed, automatically.

I think this would be nice, however my guess is that you will quickly get
burned or find out that it is less automated than anticipated.

For instance, it is possible that some conflicts would cause you to prompt the
user for input on wether to proceed or not. Which would be similar to apt-get
possibly, since apt-get will put the user in a similar situation of removing
dependant packages on something like Perl.

George Bonser noted a case with Perl 5.005, and I think Perl is an exception
to the rule since it hard codes the perl version into each module that it
produces, so if you upgrade your Perl you need to recompile all the modules.
In the case you need Perl 5.005 for something (like Perl/Tk) it would probably
be easier to grab the source from CPAN (or the Debian ftp) for the latest
stable Perl and compile it for all the modules. I can see that this would
require the breaking of many packages by upgrading Perl, unless I'm missing
something here (highly likely!;-). You can surely break things with dpkg if
you use --force, so in many ways it's a good thing that that you get prompted
by apt-get, IMO.

What would you do running as a daemon of such, when you ran across a
dependancy, I imagine you would need to prompt, right?

Even stable users would need to upgrade at some point to get patches though...

-- 

Alan DuBoff
Software Orchestration, Inc.