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Re: Reasons for recommends and suggests

Manoj Srivastava wrote:
On Sat, 19 May 2007 13:17:45 +0200, Hendrik Sattler <debian@hendrik-sattler.de> said: 
Am Samstag 19 Mai 2007 07:14 schrieb Manoj Srivastava:

If you do not wish to educate yourself on the details, perhaps you
should be heeding the directions given to you by the maintainer?



Perhaps. But first, but not all packages are actually strict about
that


        That would be a bug, then.  If you can identify such packages,
 could you please file bug reports?


and I do not want to bloat my installation


        Well, for non-buggy packages, what you have is an issue of
 trusting the maintainers judgement.  In that case, you also have to
 trust that the maintainer comes up with a correct, and properly
 formulated explanation in under one line;  which correctly emphasizes
 the importance of the dependency relationship.

        Since you don't trust the maintainers judgement in the first
 place, I think the lack of space is likely to lead to a situation that
 you'll make an equal number of incrorrect decisions dues to lack of
 information, incorrectly interpreted information, and other
 misunderstanding.
maintainer did not decide that dependency is in order but chose recommend/suggest instead - of course I want to know why so that I can figure out whether I am in the minority that does not want the package installed - it might be useless or even have unwanted effects on my usage of the package (or on my system).
the idea that if you are in the minority you already know it is broken, you cannot know that until you know, at least aproximately, what does the recommending package use recommended package for.
the issue of trusting the maintainer is irrelevant, I trust the maintainer but I want enough information to be able to collapse the wave function of probably (recommended packages) and possibly (suggestions). 

...

        Unless you are a $Deity, or have conducted an extensive
 analysis, this is a matter of judgement.  By putting things as
 recommends, the maintainer is saying, yes, it is a good thing to
 install these packages together.
exactly. In other words it means that the maintainer is saying that in some cases you might not want the recommended package installed.
you keep describing this from maintainer's perspective, imagine yourself at hands of other expert that you trust - auto-mechanic, doctor, teacher etc. You never asked question and always did what they recommneded without question, even in cases you KNEW they do not know details of your specific situation? 

	erik
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