Debtags/debram development leads one to step
manually through the archive, one package at a
time. In this activity, one thing that one
notices is the philosophically inconsistent use
of the Recommends field. Policy sect 7.2 can be
and is interpreted by maintainers in either of
two alternate ways.
(a) The social interpretation: a Recommended
package is one the maintainer recommends
to his users, in the usual English-
language sense of the word "recommends".
(b) The technical interpretation: a
Recommended package is one that is
necessary for normal use. One can
safely unpack and configure the
recommender before the Recommended, but
until the Recommended also is unpacked
and configured, the recommender is
probably not very useful. In other
words, the recommender is of little
interest to users who do not want to
install the Recommended.
The classic illustrative case of confusion on
this point is with separate X interfaces to
underlying command-line/terminal-based tools.
By (a) the social interpretation, the tool
Recommends the X interface because the
Maintainer feels that the X interface is the
most amenable way to use the package.
By (b) the technical interpretation, the tool
merely Suggests the X interface.
As review of the archive Packages file shows,
both interpretations (a) and (b) enjoy the
practical support of scores of maintainers.
There simply exists no consensus on the point.
If my own view were asked, I would observe that
the Recommends field is needed for a specific
technical purpose. In my view, social
recommendation should be confined to the
Suggests field for this reason.
Therefore I would concur with Ben when he
writes,
> ... I generally install all recommends unless
> I have a very good reason not to. Recommends
> are generally not made frivolously (or at
> least they're not supposed to be).
All things considered, this seems to me the
sound technical policy. The Recommends field is
needed for a technical purpose which no other
control field can meet. It is better not to use
the field as though it were a Strongly-Suggests.
--
Thaddeus H. Black
508 Nellie's Cave Road
Blacksburg, Virginia 24060, USA
+1 540 961 0920, t@b-tk.org
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