Re: the Recommends control field (was: dselect survey)

[Steve Greenland <steveg@moregruel.net>]

On 25-Nov-04, 07:37 (CST), Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh@debian.org> wrote: 
> On Thu, 25 Nov 2004, Thaddeus H. Black wrote:
> >   (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".
> 
> Hmm... that is certainly NOT how it should be used.  We really should have
> called "recommends" "weak-depends" or something.

Hmm... I'd have said that a) was the preferred interpetation; if a
package foo is effectively useless with a Recommended item bar, then bar
should, in fact, be a Depends, even if foo will start without bar. I
tend to think of Recommends as "strong Suggests".

So it is likely that Policy does, in fact, need clarification, but I'd
expect long discussion about what the clarification should be.

Steve

-- 
Steve Greenland
    The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating
    system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the
    world.       -- seen on the net