I think the way we report dependencies during upgrades or installs is overwhelming users, it would be better to only show dependencies that involved a decision (decision other than current state).
Consider A depends B|C, B has depends D, E; C depends F.
We should format the solutions as A, B and 2 more dependencies
(instead of A,B,D,E)
A, C and 1 more dependencies
(instead of A,C)
Because the user cares about what choices the package manager made, not which libraries those choices need.
@juliank it sounds like you could possibly take inspiration from Gentoo's USE flag system. It uses the USE environment variable to enable/disable compile time features. For an example
@juliank oh I see how it would work now. Thanks for the response and sorry for my ignorance. That's a very cool idea and would fix one of my main gripes with apt.
@huggles I mean you can already write apt install foo pulseaudio- to install foo with pulseaudio if possible. But obviously can't add positive hints, anything positive would be installed (just like any negative thing would get deinstalled if installed).
@GyrosGeier I want to achieve parity with aptitude on the CLI, so that aptitude only has the ncurses interface to offer. So those are the gaps I identified:
more capable solver
interactive solving
apt why
And I think a couple patterns are still missing too.
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