Re: [SCM] science branch, master, updated. 62a9741420de5201ef8c55e8db751b3709150359

[Ole Streicher <olebole@debian.org>]

Hi Andreas,

Andreas Tille <tille@debian.org> writes:
> I think the change of priority from extra to optional is wrong.  Per
> policy packages with priority optional can not Depend / Recommend
> packages with priority extra.  Since we have no way to control the
> priority of all dependencies the metapackages should remain at priority
> extra.  Alternatively the every single priority of metapackages needs
> to be set explicitly.

OK, that is a good point; I didn' think on it. I'll just revert the
Priority to extra for the moment.

However, this may point to a potential problem with the Blends included
in tasksel: The policy guarantees that all packages with policy
"optional" are conflict-free, but this is not true for "extra" (in fact,
conflicts are probably the main reason to use extra). So, if we are
going to install via tasksel, there may be conflicts in the package
selection, which would be a really bad experience for someone who
installs Debian the first time. While formally the "tasksel" task
dependencies are no dependencies for the policy, in fact they are.

I would guess that with a "good feeling", we can only include tasks with
all Recommends as "optional" into the list for the default installation.
Another way would be to automatically lower the priority "extra"
packages in the tasks.

My own experience while learning Debian is that "extra" is very often
chosen by mistake (I think there are some templates of the debian subdir
that use "extra"). Could someone with good apt experiences post a
command line to find out the "Priority: extra" packages in the blends?
Getting this fixed where "optional" could be used would probably help to
see where we have real problems.

Best regards

Ole