On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 17:37 +0200, Yves-Alexis Perez wrote: > On mar., 2011-08-30 at 16:11 +0100, Wolodja Wentland wrote: > > > > I agree that a general change of all metapackages is probably not a good idea, > > but I think that changing the root-nodes of the metapackage tree (i.e. > > metapackages like gnome, xfce4, kde-full, ...) is a sensible change. It is in > > particular one that solves the problems without the need to introduce new > > package fields, change packaging tools or their semantics. > > If you think some dependencies in those metapackages are unneeded or too > strong, you're welcome to open a wishlist bug against them. > > For xfce4, while I'm open to discussion, the distinction between > depends/recommends/suggests is intended, and at first sight I don't see > a need to change it. Could you elaborate on your reasons and your intentions for making the distinction? Do you have reasons for not changing Depends into Recommends? I will probably file bugs, but do not want to do so if I already know that the maintainer is not going to change it. I am sincerely interested and my only motivation is to make Debian a better distribution. It is just that I know that the behaviour discussed in this thread is a nuisance for a subset of our users and I wanted to gather additional input about different strategies to solve this. I tried to come up with a solution that does not require changes to the packaging tools, the introduction of new package fields or constitute a major change in the semantics of packages or tools. All that being said: I still have the opinion that metapackages *are* different from normal and virtual packages and that, in particular, the relations they define to other packages conflate distinct relations just because it eases implementation. (which is not inherently bad). -- Wolodja <babilen@gmail.com> 4096R/CAF14EFC 081C B7CD FF04 2BA9 94EA 36B2 8B7F 7D30 CAF1 4EFC
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