Re: Proposal for a new package relationship option
On Sat, Nov 25, 2000 at 12:01:41PM +0100, Ola Lundqvist wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 24, 2000 at 11:21:13PM -0500, Chris Gray wrote:
> > Recommends: !tm
perhaps that is the right way to specify them, without adding a line.
but what if you wanted to configure your system to treat all discouragements
as conflicts, or something like that? you then get a conflict that lies
in recommendation line. doesn't seem right for that.
> I do like this one. If it is possible to apply to suggests and depends the
> Conflicts will be depricated (but can be kept because it is easier to
> understand).
>
> Personally I like this concept with discouraging packages. It gives the
> "not so experienced admin" a way to easily get information about what
> configuration is easy and what is not. It might be confusing because that
> person do not know "why is this not suggested?", but that person gets to
> know that! And that is a really huge advantage over how it is now. People
> (including me) do not read all documentation because that just takes too
> much time.
that's correct. fact is, you never know why a package recommends another,
until you read the docs. same with some odd dependancies. take gimp for
example - it recommends the xfont packages because you'd otherwise get
weird errors - but you get that only if you read the description.
> The other point is that if discourages exists people will be lot more
> aware of the problem and it will probably be fixed earlier than it should
> have with the setup right now.
well, i think discouragements should be used when there is no point to
do a fix, like default configurations trying to use the same resources.
consider the following setup - two webservers together, for example.
such a setup is hardly common, and requires lots of scriptwork to
support properly, but yet is possible, and should be available to those
who need it.
as for security discouragements, some setups are just plain insecure
and there's not much you can do about it, aside from warning the sysadmin.
same goes for practical discouragements, something styled like:
"X is known to be buggy with this revision of Y. please use Z instead,
or a newer version of Y. you've been warned."
> I think flexibility is good most of the time.
flexibility is always good. isn't that why we all use windows^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
linux? :-)
Got tired of my sig,
Cout.
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