Re: mozilla-* / myspell-* and their Provides: / Suggests:

[Jens Peter Secher <jpsecher@diku.dk>]

Aurelien Jarno <aurelien@aurel32.net> writes:

> I agree with you on the fact that it is very rare to first install a
> library and then installing an application which use it. 

Indeed it is.

>                                                          However, for
> highly specialised libraries (if we could consider myspell-* as 
> libraries) it is a bit different. For example if you heard of a software
> called Sane to be able to use your scanner under Linux, you may first
> install libsane and then find an application which use it. That's why
> libsane recommends sane-utils.

This makes no sense.  If you want to find out which packages use
libsane, you can use 

         apt-cache rdepends libsane

> There is a lot of example like that in Debian, for example 
> liblircclient0 suggests lirc, libgphoto2-2 suggests gphoto2, libgpmg1 
> suggests gpm, libavifile-0.7c102 suggests almost avifile-*. And it is not a
> systematic search, I think there is a lot more examples like that ones.

I think those dependency suggestions are bugs and should be removed.  

The point of specifying dependencies for a particular package X is to
make sure that X has all the packages Y that X needs to function
properly. 

The three different types of dependencies all have the same direction,
namely X => Y, they only differ in _how likely_ it is that some user
will find X without Y installed to function properly.  For a "Depends",
X simply does not run without Y.  For a "Recommends", most users would
like the _extra_ functionality that Y gives X, but some users might have
constraints that disqualifies Y.  A "Suggests", then, is simply a means
to give a relation that is not otherwise automatically extractable from
the global dependency graph.

Cheers,
-- 
                                                    Jens Peter Secher
_DD6A 05B0 174E BFB2 D4D9 B52E 0EE5 978A FE63 E8A1 jpsecher get2net dk_
Shalom! (if you get my drift)