[Synaptic-devel] apt-get compatibility, filters, suggestions

[Oliver Lange]

Hello everyone !

1) custom package sources

It seems that synaptic can't handle some custom entries in 
/etc/apt/sources.list,
where apt-get has no problems with. This affects unusual entries, like:

   deb http://dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/jedit/ ./

... used for Jedit (java text editor). This is just one of several examples.

The problem is: if i once fetched these lists using apt-get, Synaptic will
never report any error, even if it always fails to fetch the package list
from such sources. It would be nice if synaptic wouldn't auto-close the
package lists fetch window if synaptic failed to download one or more lists.

2) auto-purge dependents

When uninstalling (purging) a package which is required by other packages,
Synaptic pops up a requester for uninstalling these other packages, too,
but it doesn't offer a checkbox for purging them, so all these packages
must be purged manually..

3) more filters

I'd like to add more custom filter rules, especially for listing packages by 
priority.
This allows checking for 'required' or 'important' packages, for example.

4) orphans & debfoster

Orphans: the 'orphaned' filter doesn't work with all kinds of packages. May i 
ask
if it's planned to add 'debfoster' functionality ? This would be a great 
addition
(i'm missing this feature because i'm used to have gentoo-linux doing these
cleanup things perfectly).

Regards,

Oliver 'Bloody' Lange.