On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 at 03:32:43PM +0200, 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. In the general case, yes. This needs to be fixed. But it's not relevant here because squeeze had network-manager-gnome already. So we have three scenarios: * a new install. Recommends will pull in n-m unless explicitely rejected. * upgrade from squeeze (or earlier sid). Network-manager-gnome will be upgraded if present, and if it has been removed, that was not without a cause. * debfoster/aptitude/"apt-get autoremove". Recommends will keep n-m-g safe from autoremoval. The problem with recommends is that they fail to pull in *new* relationships of an existing package, this is not what's the case here. > > A hard package-dependency in a case like this, when there isn't > > actually any hard functional dependency, and there are issues with the > > depended-upon package, are decidedly user-unfriendly. > > It is unfriendly to the extreme minority of users who want a specific > selection of packages rather than the default metapackages. So you call people who want to connect a smartphone an "extreme minority"? The last time I checked, it's hard to find a person without one. USB cables seem to be more popular than wall chargers, and a good part of phones can transfer data over them. It also gets you an order of magnitude better transfer speed than wifi, and you don't have wifi everywhere. Folks who want to connect more than one machine via a VPN are also not that rare among Debian users. Or ones with a bridged setup. Those are more technical, yeah, but: > Accidentally these are the users who also have the ability to make their > own package selection. except that unless you sit deeply in Gnome development, you don't know which exactly components you need. This is precisely what a metapackage is for. Am I supposed to know by heart whether the file manager is called "nautilus" or "caja" this week? Or what do I need to install to have clicking an image show me its contents? -- Copyright and patents were never about promoting culture and innovations; from the very start they were legalized bribes to give the king some income and to let businesses get rid of competition. For some history, please read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Monopolies_1623
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