Re: Recommends for metapackages

[Gergely Nagy <algernon@balabit.hu>]

"Eugene V. Lyubimkin" <jackyf@debian.org> writes:

> On 2012-07-10 15:32, Josselin Mouette wrote:
>> Le mardi 10 juillet 2012 à 17:38 +0900, Miles Bader a écrit : 
>> > What's wrong with Recommends: in that case?  It seems to perfectly
>> > match the "makes life easier for <common but not universal use-case
>> > XXX>" scenario you describe.
>> 
>> Recommends is wrong for metapackages because it gets upgrades very
>> wrong. This is why it is used very marginally.
>
> Standards should not depend on implementation details. I see zero
> reasons why metapackages are (or should be) specific here. Whatever $it
> that gets upgrades wrong should be fixed instead.

But the purpose of the meta-package is to pull stuff in. Depends does
that, Recommends does not, therefore Recommends is not appropriate for
the task.

For the cases where one wants to have most of the stuff installed that
the meta-package would pull in, but not all, solutions already
exist. And like Josselin said in the same mail, there is a large overlap
between those who want to push some of the stuff in Depends to
Recommends, and those who can just make their own local meta-package
within 5 minutes and be done with it.

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