On Sun, Nov 15, 1998 at 11:06:31AM -0800, Guy Maor wrote: > > Then the items would be something like: (example situation) > > Depends: needs these things to work (properly) at all. > > Recommends: you need this for it to be much use, or have it provided over > > the network > > Suggests: a lot of the extension scripts use this package > > Considers: this is another html to postscript conversion tool > > Depends is a required relationship that dpkg will enforce. Recommends > is a fairly strong relationship that is difficult to override with > dselect. Suggests is a weak relationship that is easy to override > with dselect. What behavior would Considers have? Short term, in a dselect-esque environment, when the 'dependeny issues' list appears, Suggests: would be automatically +'d, while Considers: would not. It would not be strange for a package listed as Considers: to have a Conflicts: or Replaces: with the package in question, while it *would* be odd (against Policy perhaps) for a package to Suggest or Recommend something that Conflicts or Replaces it. I see it being more helpful in future, with the apt UI has 'exploration' options in which the user (somehow) tell Apt that they (for example) want to set up print-related packages, because they just installed a printer. Rather than looking through the 'entire' (not games, etc, obviously) package list, they would simply select a major printing package, and Apt would through a series of suggestive trees, bring all the sorts of packages they'd want for general printer usage, as well as their specific uses, to their attention. On this note, I also recommend we add a Keywords line as well... it would help for just this sort of thing, and would also serve to ease 'non-de'/'non-fr' etc, as both a user (as an importer and a user) and a mirror maintainer (as an exporter) could scan these for 'offending' keys. A package maintainer would put on the Keywords line all 'potentially offensive' keys (like 'violent', 'crypto', 'tea') that apply to the package, as well as all the helpful ones (games would include genre, X window managers would have 'window-manager', etc..) Searches would be eased by this as well. -- Robert Donn Administrator, MPC Internet Services http://www.mpc.co.nz/
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