Re: If *-module depends on *-utils, should *-source recommend it?
* Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org> [050112 22:08]:
> Well, you're also leaving the package in a broken and unconfigured state.
> Doing this in order to save the user a little typing later (adding the
> original package to the second --install line) seems to me like a hack to
> make some use cases slightly more convenient, not elegance.
The elegance is that dpkg is robust in that it can always install
everything and can get cleanly from one state to another. However broken
the packages are you never end in a sitation you cannot fix again.
The additional checks suggested here add some additional term of
"correctness", that dpkg has to check on the resulting state. Without
some full formalisation or anything else to make sure it cannot get out
of this state, or can get back to that state easily, it is only a hack.
It would also break serialisation, as one would need to give a list of
packages to install to dpkg all at once or in the correct serialisation,
and no longer (with exception of configure cycles) beeing able to give
them in whatever sequence as one is pleased to do.
Hochachtungsvoll,
Bernhard R. Link
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