Re: Depends vs. Recommends
Jens Peter Secher <jps@debian.org> wrote:
> Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl> writes:
>
>> On Sun, Jul 16, 2006 at 10:11:41AM +0200, Thijs Kinkhorst wrote:
>>>
>>> I agree that that is a common type of file to recover, so that would
>>> make it more appropriate to Recommend cpio rather than Suggest.
>>
>> "a common type"? Come on, that's not just "common", it's "a vast
>> majority of cases". And, a hard Depend on a small priority=important
>> package is not a big burden -- what about just having a dependency
>> without the comment?
>
> No.
>
> And the reason can be found in Policy section 7.2:
>
[...]
> The Depends field should be used if the depended-on package is
> required for the depending package to provide a significant
> amount of functionality.
>
> The Depends field should also be used if the postinst, prerm or
> postrm scripts require the package to be present in order to
> run. Note, however, that the postrm cannot rely on any
> non-essential packages to be present during the purge phase.
[...]
>
> The dependency system is used to make sure things don't break on the
> _system_ level.
I don't agree. This "break on the system level" only relates to the
second paragraph I quoted. The first one is also a reason for a
Depends. If this other package is needed for the core functionality,
than it should be depended on.
> To ease upgrades, transitions, etc., dependencies
> (Depends) should be kept to the absolute minimum.
There's always a tradeoff: The easiest system to upgrade is one that
runs, but is barely usable for anything...
Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
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