Re: Conditional Recommends
On Mon, 23 May 2011 at 16:31:10 +0200, David Kalnischkies wrote:
> A plugin like xul-ext-firegpg (removed & discontinued upstream) enhances
> iceweasel and depends on gpg. Still, i don't think it would be a good
> idea to add something like 'Recommended-By: iceweasel & gpg'
> as this promotes this plugin nearly to priority (desktop-)standard…
I don't think this would be a good use of conditional recommendation either:
it's entirely likely that you have both iceweasel and gpg and don't want to
use them together.
However, consider gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio: it's a plugin for GStreamer
applications to output audio through the PulseAudio daemon. Neither GStreamer
nor PulseAudio should depend on the other: GStreamer applications can equally
well use ALSA, OSS or even ESD, while PulseAudio can be used for output by
plenty of non-GStreamer audio APIs.
However, if you do happen to have both GStreamer and Pulse installed, you
probably want the one to be able to output through the other.
"Recommended-by: libgstreamer0.10-0 & pulseaudio" would express this, if it's
feasible to implement.
I suspect many of the use-cases for Recommended-by are also of the form
"plugin to give abstraction layer A the ability to use backend B". The
alternative is typically to add an artificial recommendation or even
dependency in one direction or the other (e.g. A Recommends a-plugin-b which
Depends: B, effectively promoting the priority of both the plugin and B, or
vice versa), or to add an artificial recommendation or dependency to some
random third package (e.g. rhythmbox Depends: gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio, even
though it can use many other output plugins).
S
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