On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 5:26 PM, KatolaZ <katolaz@???> wrote:

>
>
To be honest, I think there is no final solution to this issue, unless
> you opt for a completely centralised (and nazist, in a good way)
> package maintenance policy, which leaves the decision on "Depends",
> "Recommends" and "Suggests" in the hands of a small group of people,
> or ideally of a single benevolent dictator, who has given the divine
> power to decide for the masses :) But this is (or at least was) rather
> inefficient (the benevolent dictator should have a comprehensive
> knowledge on all the dozens of thousands of packages included in a
> distribution) and, most importantly, definitely far from what Debian
> wanted to be....
>

IMHO the former Debian policy was a good solution. If a package needs
something to work, or to work reasonable it should depend on it. Depends
must be installed with it. If a package gets some more, especially not
always needed, feature with installation of another package it should
recommend it. Recommends should not be installed by default.
It will be no problem for newbies as they most probably will install via
tasksel or metapackages which can depend on "Recommends". It will be then
no problem for VUAs as they will pick exactly what they want.

--
Tomasz Kundera