Re: Technical Committee: decision on #119517?
Anthony Towns writes ("Re: Technical Committee: decision on #119517?"):
> On Thu, May 02, 2002 at 03:31:18PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> > 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.
So, let me just see if we all have a shared understanding now. I may
have misread Manoj's comments (and subsequent clarification) - if so,
let me know, Manoj.
1. We think that in general it's a bad thing for programs to fail
because of missing stuff that was only in an optional dependency (ie,
Recommends or Suggests rather than Depends).
2. However, there are circumstances where it is less of a bad thing
than the available alternatives, so we can't make a hard and fast rule
that it should never be done that way. For example, it is sometimes
not worth creating a separate package just for some peripheral program
or feature, and in this case Suggests or Recommends should be used, as
appropriate.
3. With respect to cardinfo, we agree with the maintainer that the
decision is at least plausibly correct in this case. (NB that we
would need a 3:1 majority to overrule the maintainer.)
4. We note that there are some other cases which are more or less
similar, and we hope that maintainers will continue to exercise their
discretion reasonably. If anyone feels that a mistake has been made
in a particular case then we will of course consider it on its merits.
There's just one thing left to consider: do we think the current
contents of the policy manual is adequate ? If not then perhaps we
should ask the policy group to try to incorporate something like my
points 1 and 2 in an appropriate place. Also, perhaps we should
review what the manual currently says.
Ian.
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