On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 09:30:04PM +0100, David Paleino wrote: > > Ubuntu defines a special archive section, 'metapackages', which results in > > special tagging/handling of the Depends and Recommends of the package so > > that they're not autoremoved if the metapackage is removed. This is > > implemented in the high-level package management tools. > Well, our proposal prospects something different: the metapackage is not > removed (thus everything else is not autoremoved) if one of its Meta- > Depends/Depends is removed. From what I can tell, the only difference between the two implementations is compatibility with disabling installation of Recommends by default. I don't think this is a good rationale for adding yet another package relationship field. The Recommends field is *already* defined in Policy to have the behavior you're looking for (installed by default but not a hard requirement), and I don't see any reason that metapackages should need the added complexity of a different field. > > In this scenario, with Recommends installed by default (the only sane > > model), > On my host, Recommends are not installed by default, and this is > configurable. A similar configuration, and meta-packages using Recommends > instead of Depends/Meta-Depends, would render them pretty useless. There are good reasons for it to be configurable: - it's useful for debugging purposes - in cases of specific packages, disabling recommends-by-default and then hand-selecting the ones you want may be more efficient than installing all recommends and selecting those to remove afterwards - it's how we want buildds and developer build chroots to be configured, so that build-dependencies aren't overlooked because they're usually installed as recommends But that doesn't mean it makes sense for users to set this setting globally on their systems, or to design further complexity into our package manager to accomodate such configurations. > > the vast majority of metapackage dependencies are moved from > > Depends to Recommends, so you can remove those Recommends manually without > > forcing removal of the metapackage; > This already happens now, or did I miss something? The difference is that the packages that are now listed as Depends would be moved to Recommends. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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