Re: Getting rid of circular dependencies

[Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de>]

Bill Allombert <ballombe@master.debian.org> writes:

> On Fri, Jun 24, 2005 at 07:39:16PM +0200, Santiago Vila wrote:
>> 
>> Perhaps we should just move to section libs any package which is
>> useless by itself, and it's only useful in combination with others,
>> much like libraries, but without requiring them to be real libraries.
>
> Good idea. Or we could have a new section for architecture independant data.
> Moving everything which is not mean to be directly installed by users
> in it, so the section games only contains actual games and not the data
> files.
>
> Cheers,

Let me suggest obsoleting sections altogether and getting debtags more
firmly placed into the project. Sections are too limited for the
amount of packages in debian.

E.g. xemacs needs to be in editors, x11, web, news, games and mail
sections.


But that doesn't realy solve the problem on its own. It would be nice
if packages could be consistently taged with "Application:
yes|no|<untaged>" signifying that this package is usefull on its own
(foo), will never be used alone (foo-data, libfoo) or is
ambigious. Frontends should then hide anything with "Application: no"
under normal operations.

I'm wondering if popcon data could be used to see how many users have
package foo installed without anything depending on foo.

MfG
        Goswin