package priorities "less than optional"

["James R. Van Zandt" <jrv@vanzandt.mv.com>]

joost@rulcmc.leidenuniv.nl (joost witteveen) wrote:

>As far as I know, it's still policy that every package should be
>"optional", unless there are good reasons to make it anything else.
>
>Reasons to make it less than optional, as was explained by Ian Jackson
>many, many, many moons ago, could only include things like "it cannot
>operate with other popular packages", or "it may skrew your system".

>From my copy of the policy:
     `optional'
          (In a sense everything is optional that isn't required, but
          that's not what is meant here.) This is all the software
          that you might reasonably want to install if you didn't know
          what it was or don't have specialised requirements. This is
          a much larger system and includes X11, a full TeX
          distribution, and lots of applications.

     `extra'
          This contains packages that conflict with others with higher
          priorities, or are only likely to be useful if you already
          know what they are or have specialised requirements.

I maintain several packages which address unusual pieces of hardware:
gpstrans (for communicating with a Garmin global positioning system
receiver), emacspeak (allows emacs to send output to a speech
synthesizer), etc.  In my last upload I downgraded gpstrans to "extra"
since I considered a GPS receiver a pretty specialized requirement.
Was I wrong?

                               - Jim Van Zandt


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