Re: Bug#99835: seemingly useless and ill-conceived "meta" packages
On 6.VI.2001 at 11:51 Joey Hess wrote:
> Anton Zinoviev wrote:
> > I know about that task packages are going to be obsoleted by Task: field
> > and that's why I made meta-magicfilter and meta-apsfilter. The
> > maintainer of recode doesn't have to know that recode is used by some
> > filters of magicfilter. Why he has to know that his package is relevant
> > to task `Printing'? And why he has to know that some future version of
> > magicfilter don't use recode any more? That's why in my opinion the
> > task `Printing' should install meta-magicfilter but not directly
> > magicfilter and supporting filters.
>
> The Task: fields are populated by an overrides mechanism, which comes
> out of some files in debian cvs that more or less anyone can modify.
Reading the posts in debian-policy I had an impression that the override
mechanism is only a temporary solution. If it isn't then the task
`Printing' doesn't need meta-magicfilter.
> My main beef with the meta-* packages is that they seem to create a bad
> predicent that is likely to prove very confusing to users. I'm all for
> meta packages, but only if they do not have meta- in their name.
BTW, using meta- helps finding metapackages.
> This generally means they have to have a slightly broader scope.
OK.
> By contrast, your meta- packages don't seem to ease maintainance of
> the printing task really, since you could just maintain it in cvs, and
> they seem more likely to confuse users.
OK. Some day (when master.d.o is on) I will send a bugreport to
ftp.debian.org with a request to remove task-printing from the archive.
Anton Zinoviev, zinoviev@debian.org
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