Re: Unmet Deps revisted

[Enrique Zanardi <ezanardi@ull.es>]

On Wed, Jan 20, 1999 at 10:22:39AM +0000, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> 
> Santiago Vila writes:
> >>> smail is still optional, but conflicts with exim, so it should be extra.
> >>> hello-debhelper conflicts with hello, and has absolutely no extra
> >>> functionality over ordinary hello, so the binary should be removed, in
> >>> either case it should be extra.
> >>> gmc conflicts with mc, but both are optional.
> >>>
> >>> There are in total *ten* dselect Dependency/conflict resolution screens.
> >>> (using the PageForward key). Am I *really* required to report them *all*,
> >>> or may I ask our kind ftp.debian.org maintainers to do a *serious*
> >>> dependency/conflict check *before* the deep freeze?
> 
> Am I missing something here? Where does it say that users should be able
> to install _all_ optional packages?

The policy manual suggests that:

"2.2 Priorities
[...]
   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.
"

By the definition of optional, a user may install all optional packages
if she doesn't know what they are (!) or don't have specialised
requirements.

If there are optional packages that conflict with each other, we should
choose one to stay in optional and move the others to extra. (Or change/
clarify the definition on the policy manual).

--
Enrique Zanardi					   ezanardi@ull.es