Re: Unmet Deps revisted

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

On Wed, 13 Jan 1999, Joseph Carter wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 13, 1999 at 09:31:07PM +0100, Santiago Vila wrote:
> > > > smail is still optional, but conflicts with exim, so it should be extra.
> > > 
> > > Why?  I can understand why sendmail for example is in extra, it's a
> > > scarey program and unless you know what you're doing you should probably
> > > not use it.  But how do other MTAs fit a similar description?
> > 
> > Because if smail is optional then you can't install all the optional
> > packages as well as all the essential, required, important and standards
> > packages.
> 
> Considering this is more than 1,000 packages, I don't see why you should
> want to install them all.

It is possible that only a few people will want to install 1,000 packages.

However, it is almost sure that someone will want to install a random set
of 200 packages among those 1,000, another person will want to install
another random set of 200 packages, and yet another person will want to
install another random set of 200 packages.

Following Murphy's law, there will be *always* someone who discover that
the distribution is not consistent.

If we can avoid a lot of people to lose a lot of time, we should
avoid it.

> > If exim is the preferred MTA of choice in Debian, then all the others
> > should have extra priority.
> 
> It's not the "preferred choice of Debian".  There needs to be one that is
> used if the user doesn't pick one.  It just happens that exim is a good
> choice for a system in that case.

Fine.

The fact that we decided to ship exim and not sendmail means that we
*preferred* exim over sendmail, in some way. Since we had to choose
between exim, sendmail, smail, etc and finally decided that exim
was the one to be installed if the user doesn't pick one, we were
in fact *choosing* exim.

So, from the several possible choices, exim has been the preferred one.

For me, this means exim is currently the "preferred choice of Debian
for the standard install", so yes, it's the preferred choice of Debian.

-- 
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