Re: Reasons for recommends and suggests
On Fri, 18 May 2007, Daniel Burrows wrote:
> I would very much be in favor of adding new, optional fields that
> describe the dependencies of the package. These can be integrated
> into the package management interface at appropriate points, without
> cluttering the description itself.
While I think it would be better to use README.Debian, since you're
going to end up writing one implementation, do whatever you decide is
best.
> Stuffing information into README.Debian doesn't help, since (a) you
> can't read it until you've installed the package, and
Adapting the p.d.o changelog script to do this would allow it to be
seen before the package is installed, so that's not exactly
insurmountable.
> (b) NLP parsing isn't good enough to find the text you need and
> extract it automatically :-).
It's not like it would be difficult to decide on a standard to allow
the segment of text in README.Debian that described the optional
dependencies (or other information that a packagea maintainer thought
people may be interested in knowing as they're deciding what else to
install besides the package.)
In any event, I think I've made my opinion clear enough, so I'll stop
here.
Don Armstrong
--
She was alot like starbucks.
IE, generic and expensive.
-- hugh macleod http://www.gapingvoid.com/batch3.htm
http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
Reply to: