Re: mozilla-* / myspell-* and their Provides: / Suggests:
- To: debian-devel@lists.debian.org
- Subject: Re: mozilla-* / myspell-* and their Provides: / Suggests:
- From: Jens Peter Secher <jpsecher@diku.dk>
- Date: Thu, 08 Jan 2004 22:28:12 +0100
- Message-id: <[🔎] 8765fmdtar.fsf@valkyrie.get2net.dk>
- In-reply-to: <1bJEe-2bW-13@gated-at.bofh.it> (Aurelien Jarno's message of "Thu, 08 Jan 2004 15:50:18 +0100")
- References: <18ylM-kg-1@gated-at.bofh.it> <18BWB-6te-23@gated-at.bofh.it> <18Cpu-7nA-7@gated-at.bofh.it> <18F43-3dS-23@gated-at.bofh.it> <1bJEe-2bW-13@gated-at.bofh.it>
Aurelien Jarno <aurelien@aurel32.net> writes:
> I agree with you on the fact that it is very rare to first install a
> library and then installing an application which use it.
Indeed it is.
> However, for
> highly specialised libraries (if we could consider myspell-* as
> libraries) it is a bit different. For example if you heard of a software
> called Sane to be able to use your scanner under Linux, you may first
> install libsane and then find an application which use it. That's why
> libsane recommends sane-utils.
This makes no sense. If you want to find out which packages use
libsane, you can use
apt-cache rdepends libsane
> There is a lot of example like that in Debian, for example
> liblircclient0 suggests lirc, libgphoto2-2 suggests gphoto2, libgpmg1
> suggests gpm, libavifile-0.7c102 suggests almost avifile-*. And it is not a
> systematic search, I think there is a lot more examples like that ones.
I think those dependency suggestions are bugs and should be removed.
The point of specifying dependencies for a particular package X is to
make sure that X has all the packages Y that X needs to function
properly.
The three different types of dependencies all have the same direction,
namely X => Y, they only differ in _how likely_ it is that some user
will find X without Y installed to function properly. For a "Depends",
X simply does not run without Y. For a "Recommends", most users would
like the _extra_ functionality that Y gives X, but some users might have
constraints that disqualifies Y. A "Suggests", then, is simply a means
to give a relation that is not otherwise automatically extractable from
the global dependency graph.
Cheers,
--
Jens Peter Secher
_DD6A 05B0 174E BFB2 D4D9 B52E 0EE5 978A FE63 E8A1 jpsecher get2net dk_
Shalom! (if you get my drift)
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