Re: Reasons for recommends and suggests
>>>>> "Hendrik" == Hendrik Sattler <debian@hendrik-sattler.de> writes:
Hendrik> Perhaps. But first, but not all packages are actually
Hendrik> strict about that and I do not want to bloat my
Hendrik> installation and second, if it is really that important
Hendrik> (read: essential part of functionality) is would be a
Hendrik> Depends. Does it really happen that often that this
Hendrik> Recommends is needed. Or is it just to be on the safe
Hendrik> side? Anyway, it was just an example out of many. For
Hendrik> non-core packages, Recommends often add functionality
Hendrik> that I'll never use but the package maintainer uses them
Hendrik> daily. Why should I install it then?
In the past I have seen (broken) packages that recommend "apache"[1].
Huh? Does this mean the package is incompatible with apache2?
In fact, I suspect at least some these packages may work fine with
other httpd daemons that the maintainer didn't know about at the time.
Just because the maintainer recommends that I should have "apache"
installed doesn't mean it will loose functionality if "apache" is not
installed - unless it really is some weird package that depends on
this obsolete version of apache.
A description of "to support the HTTP protocol" would imply that the
version is not important.
Notes:
[1] as far as I can tell most packages now depend on httpd as an
alternative, so perhaps this specific example is no longer an
issue. However the concept still stands.
I did notice one package (education-main-server) recommends "apache2 |
apache" but I am not going to try and work out if apache is really
required or not.
--
Brian May <bam@snoopy.debian.net>
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