Re: fortunes optional or extra

[Peter S Galbraith <GalbraithP@dfo-mpo.gc.ca>]

Christian Surchi wrote:

> We have many packages with an extra priority and no reason for this.

Policy says:

     `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 specialized requirements.  This is a much larger
          system and includes the X Window System, a full TeX distribution,
          and many applications.  Note that optional packages should not
          conflict with each other.

     `extra'
          This contains all packages that conflict with others with
          required, important, standard or optional priorities, or are only
          likely to be useful if you already know what they are or have
          specialised requirements.

Note that the emphasis is on usefulness rather than `conflicts
with each other'.  I think I would have been happier with the
reverse; someone who wanted a fully-loaded Debian could just
install everthing `optional'.  I'm probably only saying this
because almost all of my packages are priority extra, not because
they conflict, but because they are specialized.

However, the http://packages.debian.org interface doesn't list
the priority field, nor does it matter to apt-get.  Since I never
use dselect anymore, this field has become unimportant to me.
So why this post?  I'm not sure...

Peter