Re: Reasons for recommends and suggests
On Sat, May 19, 2007 at 09:52:44AM -0500, Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> was heard to say:
> A field in the control file is unlikely to have enough space to
> truly state the reasons (remember, the maintainer has alsready stated
> that in their judgement the packages belong together for all but the
> most unusual installations). Adding a special file with expanded
> explanations or essays might work.
The goal is not to produce an iron-clad defense of your judgement,
it's to allow the user to make a more informed judgement than they
could otherwise make.
I've drawn some packages fully at random from the package list to see
whether there's any reason to believe that we couldn't construct a helpful
explanation of their suggestions. It's interesting to note that
somewhere around 3/4 of the packages I checked didn't have any
suggestions or recommendations at all, so even if we tried to document
all suggestions fully, most packages would be unaffected.
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pop-before-smtp Suggests: imap-server | pop3-server
Suggests-Reason: imap-server | pop3-server: because pop-before-smtp needs access to the log file of your POP3 or IMAP server.
pop-before-smtp scans the logs of your POP3 or IMAP server in order to
detect user logins. If the server is running on another computer, you
must provide access to its log files on this computer (for instance, by
enabling remote syslog access).
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kdeaccessibility-doc-html Suggests: kdebase
Suggests-Reason: kdebase: to run the software this package documents.
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kdeartwork-misc Suggests: kworldclock
Suggests-Reason: kworldclock: to make use of the kworldclock themes included in this package.
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ttf-bengali-fonts Suggests: x-ttcidfont-conf
Suggests-Reason: x-ttcidfont-conf: to automatically register these fonts with the X window system.
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pida Suggests: bicyclerepair
Suggests-Reason: bicyclerepair: because bicycle-repair is a useful Python tool that I like.
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(I installed both pida and bicycle-repair, and as far as I can tell,
this is the only relationship between them. bicycle-repair has IDE
plugins...but there doesn't seem to be one for pida)
Daniel
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