Hi!

  It would be really usefull from time to time to have a comandline
trigger or environment variable to make apt-get completely ignore any
system wide configuration. Currently both -c and APT_CONFIG allow to
*add* configuration snippets but not to replace / get rid of any.

Regards

    Christoph

mkdir /tmp/apt-empty-dir
echo 'Dir::Etc::main "/dev/null";' > /tmp/no-apt.conf
echo 'Dir::Etc::parts "/tmp/apt-empty-dir";' >> /tmp/no-apt.conf
export APT_CONFIG=/tmp/no-apt.conf
apt-config dump
To not parse any (real) file (and avoid any warnings related to it).

To remove parts of the configuration the
#clear Option::Setting;
command in a (usually) with -c supplied config-file can be used.

Replace is as easy as setting the option to a different value,
for list options #clear should be used before of course…


The "problem" with an option - beside that it is already possible - is:
Are preferences files configuration files?
Are trusted.gpg files configuration files?
Are sources.list files configuration files?
Yes / No / Maybe / Once in a blue moon.

And is it worth to introduce such a feature in apt-get if aptitude, synaptics,
softwarecenter, … doesn't provide such an option and would need to be
changed to provide some sort of consistency (they all use the same config
files, so they should have a comparable behavior based on it).

So, what do you think: Is this worthwhile and
if so which exact behavior should it have?


Best regards

David Kalnischkies