On Thu, May 02, 2002 at 03:31:18PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> >>"Anthony" == Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> writes:
> > You need to take this in context though. If they're running in X, then
> > it'll work fine, because xlibs will already have been installed. If
> > they're not running in X, one'll get a linker failure, the other will
> > get a "DISPLAY not set" failure.
> > "Hey why doesn't cardinfo work?"
> > "It's an X program and you don't have X installed."
> > Doesn't seem particularly hard? (Seems a lot easier than
> > explaining it to the cognoscenti tbh... :)
> ;-)
> In this particular case, you got me. In the general case,
> though, I still think my arguments have merit.
Right, but that's kind-of the point: in the general case this isn't an
issue, since everyone recognises it's a bad thing to do and there're
very few cases where fixing it would actually be worse.
> I would leave it to the members to decide whether this should
> affect the recommendations we make in this case. I would like to
> point out, though, that recommendations of this committee are taken
> to set a precedence, and perhaps we should be thinking in gernal
> terms when we make the recommendations.
I'd be rather concerned if the technical committee (or debian-policy,
where I've argued similar things), took good general principles and
turned them into unbreakable rules.
The argument about having cars lock your maximum speed at whatever the
speed limit is locally (via a GPS and a geographical database, eg) and
have no provision for overriding it seems to apply. Sometimes you're
rushing to a hospital. Sometimes adding the dependency is impossible,
and splitting the package isn't worthwhile.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``BAM! Science triumphs again!''
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