Author: sajolida Date: To: The Tails public development discussion list Subject: [Tails-dev] Impossible to install some packages on Tails through
plain apt
As pointed out by several Whisperback bug reports, it is not possible to
install some packages in Tails neither using a canonical "apt-get
install $package command" neither using Synaptics.
This affects only a small set of packages having dependencies on the
ones that are marked with pin priority of -1 in /etc/apt/preferences.
This was done to speed up the build I think.
To install them you have to type `apt-get install $package/squeeze`.
I noticed that a while ago but I failed to find use cases that would be
important enough for Tails to care. Now I have one: intltool, that we
use in our gettext workflow, depends on automake, which depends on
autoconf, which depends on m4. And it is a legitimate use case of Tails
to use it to translate Tails.
So we might want to either:
- Say this is a problem in general, and instead remove all those
packages at the end of the build than setting them a -1 pin priority.
- Review this list of packages on an ad-hoc basis.
I'm ready to propose a branch to implement any of those options.
