Re: Metapackage dependencies: "Depends" or "Recommends"?
On 28/07/15 13:55, Paul Tagliamonte wrote:
> Well, I have a personal "thing" about this - it strikes me as quirky to
> not have a Depends, since those metapackages, without all of them, is
> technically not satisfied.
...
> I'd prefer to see metapackages use
> Recommends for the things that should (but don't *have* to be)
> installed, and Depends for the things that the metapackage is there
> for.
Consider a metapackage "games-fps" which pulls in openarena, nexuiz,
warsow and others, but does not have any particular reason to treat any
of them as mandatory; if you don't like OpenArena's visual style, for
instance, it's fine to deselect it, but if you have deselected *all* the
FPS games that were offered, then there's no point in having games-fps
at all.
Strictly speaking, from what you're saying, games-fps should have:
Depends: openarena | nexuiz | warsow | ...
Recommends: openarena, nexuiz, warsow, ...
because its purpose is to pull in 1 or more of those FPS games?
But actually implementing this would result in a lot of duplication (and
a more complex dependency graph), because there are really more than
three games offered; and there's no particular reason to list the games
in that order. So I think omitting the Depends and just taking the
Recommends is a reasonable simplification in cases like this one?
S
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