Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
[snip] Unless we split the functionality such that we have both, I think you're correct. I know for sure we can't do away with the technical recommends. I'd rather we separate the social one (or kill it altogether) so that we can finally fix apt-get and stop the annoying bug reports of people who do not even KNOW they are not supposed to ignore a technical recommends unless they Really Know Better.
I too believe that recommends are taken too lightly. This is why I can't accept a package manager which automatically selects recommends; I get way too many unneeded packages that way. I think the policy manual makes it pretty clear that recommends are to be for packages without which the package would be pretty useless. If some interepret it differently, a clarification is most certainly needed. Then I could always fetch recommends and simply file bug reports when it was unwarranted. Of course a more drastic action like renaming the field could be taken, but thats probably unncessary.
Michael Spang