Re: Library depending on -data packages

[Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de>]

Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:

> (dropped cc's; hopefully that's okay.)
> Hi!
>
> Luca Capello wrote:
>
>> I see these situations as a misuse of Depends: where Recommends: would
>> be perfectly fine, otherwise Recommends: are useless.  But given that it
>> seems no one agrees with me, is such a behavior documented somewhere?
>
> Checking policy, I see:
>
> 	The Recommends field should list packages that would be found
> 	together with this one in all but unusual installations.
>
> which I grant is not all that helpful.


Look at it from an installing point of view. When installing foo should
also install bar in all but unusual installations then "foo Recomends:
bar" is the right thing.

In the case of a foo-data package recommending the foo package I would
say that that users should not install foo-data but install foo in all
but unusual circumstances. Since foo-data will not be installed directly
but allways through foo the question of wether it should recommend foo
becomes pointless. Yes, foo-data will nearly always be found together
with foo simply because foo depends on foo-data.

Imho we really don't want a recommends for reverse depends. Or do you
think libc6 should recommend coreutils because they will allways be
found together?

MfG
        Goswin