tag 438665 wontfix merge 438665 445900 thanks Clint Adams wrote:
reopen 438665 quit On Wed, Oct 31, 2007 at 06:22:11PM +0100, Luk Claes wrote:That sounds like the Dependens should be a Recommends, if so please file a bug for it.It doesn't look like #438665 was actually fixed.
<rant>OK, then I'll tag it wontfix and merge it with _yet another_ reporting of this same issue (which was also tagged wontfix), instead of closing it. Discussing this issue (including other versions of it reported about every month) has been taking up a significant part of the acpi-support maintainer load for quite some time. Raising the issue _yet again_, especially in such a high-profile forum such as this, will cause much higher-priority issues to be stalled _yet again_. I'm afraid I'll be using my spare time yet again to discuss a tiny amount of disk space instead of fixing people's laptops that don't work. To reiterate the arguments made in the various bug reports: the dependencies are currently _not a bug_, they are a _requirement_, hence the Depends. They are a necessity for the stated goal of the package: to make all laptops "just work". The current state of the surrounding infrastructure simply doesn't allow for a different solution. If somebody can come up with a bit of infrastructure to fix this up that doesn't have any drawbacks, be my guest and submit a patch! :-)
</rant>Sorry if I sound a bit bitter, spend a couple of months in gulag acpi-support and you'll understand. ;-) I'll add a couple of actual technical notes, for those who are interested:
1. In response to this bug report, the dependencies on X clients were reduced significantly to include only the package that contains xset. This was the part of Depends that was actually superfluous, and it reduced the depends load significantly. This was the reason the bug report was closed instead of tagged "wontfix".
2. What we may actually require is a detection system which triggers the installation of packages at installation time, based on hardware detection. Something like this was discussed in more detail in #445900. In the absence of a dependable non-overkill (not larger than the packages involved, not a much higher maintenance burden) system that does that, or Recommends which behaves exactly like Depends (like some package managers treat Recommends, but not all), I'd prefer to stay with plain Depends to actually get laptops which "just work". Unless somebody comes up with a patch that guarantees that it doesn't break more than 1% of the hardware that we support, of course.
3. Regarding the toshset package: I have a working Toshiba Tecra 8200, one of the models covered by toshset. I may be biased, but as far as I'm concerned the stuff is still useful. :-)
Cheers, Bart