On February 2, 2005 08:36, Michail Bachmann wrote: > On Wednesday 02 February 2005 14:11, Christopher Martin wrote: > > Believe me, we get a ton of reports from new users whose packages > > don't work because they didn't install the Recommends. But that's not > > why I made kppp depend on ppp - I did it because it does depend on > > ppp. > > If I may ask, what was the reason that until now it just recommended > it? Maybe I filed the wrong bug for the wrong package version... ;-) Good question. Possibly for the very reason you brought up, though that would not have been correct :) > > By the rationale you are putting forward, packages depended on by a > > metapackage should never have any dependencies at all, since of the > > ~100 packages installed by the kde metapackage, you may only use 20, > > yet would then be obliged to install un-needed dependencies for the > > other 80. In short, package dependencies should not be affected the > > presence of a metapackage. > > Yes you are right, I just did not thought about it that way. > > > I understand your concern, but the real problem is that metapackages > > are a crude solution to a general problem. If you don't need one of > > the packages installed by a metapackage, you could simply uninstall > > the metapackage. Perhaps, though, a nicer solution would be for the > > metapackages to only Recommend their packages - that way people could > > customize their KDE installs without losing the metapackages, which > > many seem not to want to do. > > > > Comments anyone? > > I like that idea very much. So the metapackages will be just a hint > from the maintainers how a reasonable system using them could be set > up. That way new users would just follow all recommendations, but > advanced users could still configure their system to their needs. Exactly. Current Depends would become Recommends, and the Recommends could become Suggests. Cheers, Christopher Martin
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