apt feature requests.
Hello everyone.
I joined the mailing list to suggest a few features in apt which's
mostly related to Desktop systems.
First, apt doesn't have a proper mirror system. Adding separate servers
in sources.list is like adding separate repositories, updating will
download package index from all of these mirrors. Also if download fails
from one mirror only 2 or 3 mirrors are checked for re fetching instead
of all listed.
It happens frequently that packages are removed from the servers, so for
a package index if download fails aptitude should download the package
from snapshot.debian.org.
In case the download speeds are too slow, the user should have an option
to change the mirror using key combinations like cntrl+m, in apt.conf,
there should be a key to set the minimum download speed under which
mirrors will switch.
aptitude/apt-get download action doesn't work well. On testing I'm
getting -
E: No downloadable files for icedtea-netx version 1.1-1; perhaps it is a
local or obsolete package?
E: No downloadable files for icedtea-plugin version 1.1-1; perhaps it is
a local or obsolete package?
E: No downloadable files for icedtea6-plugin version 6b21.1-1; perhaps
it is a local or obsolete package?
E: No downloadable files for libavcodec52 version 5:0.6.3-0.0; perhaps
it is a local or obsolete package?
E: No downloadable files for libavcore0 version 5:0.6.1+svn20101128-0.2;
perhaps it is a local or obsolete package?
...
aptitude doesn't even try to check if the package exist in the mirrors,
actually these packages are valid and even in the mirrors.
To reproduce, try downloading all installed Debian packages in your
system -
#aptitude download $(aptitude -F %p search '~i')
Also download shouldn't stop completely if one package doesn't exist or
fails to download.
A dependency problem -- there should be an option to install
recommended/suggested packages by default only for manually installed
packages, currently setting installation of suggested packages by
default results in chaos for this reason.
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