Re: Installation of Recommends by default on October 1st
On Wed, 2007-08-01 at 22:38 +0200, Pierre Habouzit wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 01, 2007 at 09:56:43PM +0200, Loïc Minier wrote:
> > On Wed, Aug 01, 2007, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> > > > We, the APT Development Team, will change apt to install recommended
> > > > packages by default on October 1st. This should give enough time to
> > > Why? What is the point?
> >
> > Fix Recommends! These are nothing more than Suggests right now --
> > except in aptitude.
>
> Well, even if they were used properly (and we agree they aren't, see
> the bug Joss filed on lighttpd e.g. ...), I'm not bought to the argument
> that _apt_ should install those by default.
>
> I mean, recommends means that having the recommends installed may e.g.
> enable some additionnal features in your package. But if the user don't
> need them, then what ? he will download loads of packages for nothing ?
> See openoffice.org, I think it recommends java or many things like that.
> If I don't want to install java and the hundreds of megabytes it come
> with, how am I supposed to do ?
>
> apt-cache show openoffice.org-writer |grep Recom
> Recommends: openoffice.org-filter-binfilter, gij | java-gcj-compat | j2re1.4 | java2-runtime, openoffice.org-java-common (>> 2.2.0-4)
>
> And really, I think this recommends like is perfectly correct, as many
> features in OOo are enabled if you have java installed.
Sometimes you don't want recommends or depends [0] and sometimes they
are necessary [1].
I know it's stupid:
--
$ apt-get install --fix-policy --install-recommends
[...]
0 upgraded, 275 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 311MB/311MB of archives.
After unpacking 839MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? ARE YOU STUPID?!?
--
I will have debian-reference in further 9 languages. But I think in long
term we will have less problems. We should start filing bugs against all
those packages we see with the above command and think they don't need
to be installed and should get the number to a minimum.
But going this way I see a big problem on decisions if a package should
be recommended or suggested. E.g. I don't want [0] to be installed by
default but Loic seems to do so.
Regards,
Amir
[0] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=430024
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=415436
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