Dear Debian Developers, I've already spoken about this at LinuxTag after the Debian talk held by tolimar and also had a short discussion on #debian At the moment there is no way to get more information about suggested/recommended packages, except their names. In particular I am talking about which functionality is added when also installing them. I missed this feature in debian after seeing Arch Linux, which executes a simple echo-line in the tar.gz of a package being installed, which I found to be very useful. let me give you an example: amarok produces following output ifuse (optional) - support for Apple iPod Touch and iPhone libgpod (optional) - support for Apple iPod audio devices libmtp (optional) - support for portable media devices libmygpo-qt (optional) - gpodder.net Internet Service loudmouth (optional) - backend needed by mp3tunes for syncing As you can see, it is very hard for ordinary users to find out what the package is doing by just seeing the packagename, that is why I think that additional info should be provided in a uniform way. By now there is only the Readme.Debian which could contain this but I couldn't find a package providing it. Anyway, a disadvantage of this "solution" is, that the package first needs to be installed and the users needs to navigate and search for that specific info. A better way to solve this (IMHO) could be, in giving the maintainer (which should know about the dependencies very well) an optional tag in the control file. I know that this would be a relative huge step (policies would need to be updated) but this way, the package does not need to be installed and users could use apt-get/aptitude and add/remove packages which better fit to their needs. Also this info needs to be added just once (in general) by the maintainer and since it is optional it could be added later at any time. I would be happy to see a feature like this (in wheezy). Best regards -- eshat cakar web: www.eshat.de gpg-id: 799B 95D5 gpg-fingerprint: D59E 3B77 8662 D221 0900 D758 9D0F C2C1 799B 95D5
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