On 09/05/27 13:41 -0700, Russ Allbery said ...
> Y Giridhar Appaji Nag <appaji@debian.org> writes:
>
> > I read that part of policy (only likely to be useful if you already
> > know what they are) as "there is an optional package that has been
> > built out of the same source package, but this one is built for
> > special needs of that package". My understanding was that this was
> > largely for packages that conflict with those in >= optional.
> >
> > OK, I looked at debootstrap and cdebootstrap, while the former is
> > extra the latter is optional.
> >
> > As a maintainer of policy, what do you think?
>
> I use extra for anything that I consider to be for special use, obscure,
> or otherwise probably not worth listing with all the other packages in
> its section for the casual browser looking for interesting packages.
This seems to be a very subjective criteria. So is the text in policy:
optional
(In a sense everything that isn't required is optional, but that's not
what is meant here.) This is all the software that you might reasonably
want to install if you didn't know what it was and don't have
specialized requirements. This is a much larger system and includes the
X Window System, a full TeX distribution, and many applications. Note
that optional packages should not conflict with each other.
The tricky part is "reasonably".
> So, for instance, funky old Kerberos v4 compatibility packages I
> consider extra, or a new but currently mostly unused SASL
> implementation, or Shishi (an interesting Kerberos implementation, but
> 99% of users will want either MIT or Heimdal instead).
I agree with this particular example. But I could argue if would "reasonbly
want to install" Kerberos if I "Didn't know what it was".
I've not seen ftp-master enforce the distinction between optional and extra,
not even in the cases where it is very clearly defined in policy i.e. extra
"contains all packages that conflict with others with required, important,
standard or optional priorities". And in case of "Packages must not depend on
packages with lower priority values (excluding build-time dependencies).".
Look at the Debcheck pages.
I am not sure if enforcing "extra" in cases other than conflicts, Depends: on
lower priority and very clear specialised requirements (elinks-lite, debug
symbols etc.) gains us much.
Regards,
Giridhar
--
Y Giridhar Appaji Nag | http://people.debian.org/~appaji/
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