Re: If *-module depends on *-utils, should *-source recommend it?

[Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net>]

Scripsit Scott James Remnant <scott@netsplit.com>
> On Wed, 2005-01-12 at 12:26 -0800, Daniel Burrows wrote:

>>  Just to be clear: you mean the elegance of the dpkg code, not its
>> external behavior, right?  Because I don't see anything elegant
>> about erroring out and leaving an operation half-completed.
 
> Why not?

Because it would be more elegant to tell the it to the user up front:
    What you have asked me to do will inevitably end with an error
than to make him wait.

Then the user could start taking corrective action immediately instead
of having to wait for a lot of work to happen and then afterwards be
left with a package in an inconsistent state where it is probably not
useful. (For if it *is* useful in this state, it should not have
declared a dependency at all).

Sorry, but I cannot see why anyone would *want* to *wait* for their
system to be put into an inconsistent (or at least: no more useful
than it already was) before being alerted to the error.

Could you explain why you think this behaviour would be elegant,
rather than implying that it is self-evident and the rest of us are
all morons? (We may be, but we're not going to get wiser by being told
that we are. Having explained the effect that we overlook may help,
though.)

> It means that you just need to go fetch and install the
> dependency,

And that it exactly what the same error given earlier would mean.

> you don't need to try and install the depending package again.

If the error was reported before, you wouldn't have even tried
installing the depending package in first place. Therefore, no
"again" in that scenario either.

-- 
Henning Makholm                     "The practical reason for continuing our
                                  system is the same as the practical reason
                          for continuing anything: It works satisfactorily."