Re: Bug#64460: whois package shouldn't be Priority: important, rather optional
I think some common sense is necessary here. To me, "required" means that
the system does not run or is severely compromised in terms of usefulness.
I consider things like getty, login, or the shell "required."
Very few things are actually listed as "important." Mostly this is the
man pages and their related utilities, cron, and the mailx reader. I'm
not sure whether exim should be "important," but that's another issue. It
does seem to me that a lot of things which are listed as "required" should
probably be "important," but in practice most users will need them all.
Most of the stuff in bsdmainutils really seems "standard" to me, not
"important." I doubt anyone would regard a system as seriously deficient
in terms of basic operation if it were missing whois, cal, and vacation.
-- Mike
On 2000-05-21 at 22:02 +0200, Josip Rodin wrote:
> I believe you do, but a large majority of people never even heard of whois,
> and will never need it. Besides, most people expect to find X on every unix
> system, yet most of X in Debian is optional. OTOH argument to keep whois
> with the default Debian system (i.e. with a priority higher than optional)
> is its very small size.
>
> Let's CC: this to debian-devel, maybe someone else (smarter than me :) has
> an opinion on this.
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