:: Re: [Dng] Use/misuse of depends
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Author: KatolaZ
Date:  
To: Tomasz Kundera
CC: dng
Subject: Re: [Dng] Use/misuse of depends
On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 07:29:02PM +0100, Tomasz Kundera wrote:
> 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.
>


That's exactly my point, and I agree that Recommends should not be
installed by default. Perhaps the addition of a few metapackages
depending on Recommends would be more than enough in most of the
cases.

My2Cents

KatolaZ

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