Re: Recommends for metapackages

[Gergely Nagy <algernon@balabit.hu>]

Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh@debian.org> writes:

> IMO, metapackages should "depend" on the absolutely required stuff (and many
> times that will be the empty set), "recommend" the rest, and maybe even
> "suggest" fringe packages.  This achieves maximum usability for more
> usecases, and malfunctions only in the unsupported case of "no install
> recommends by default" -- you should skip recommends always in a
> case-by-case basis.

That also achives maximum annoyance, because if I want the full
platform, I'll have to go recommends/suggest hunting. (No, I'm *not*
going to turn on install-recommends.)

> OTOH, metapackages from hell (like gnome or kde-full) based on Depends
> require me to select them, go to the "will install these" screen, deselect
> the meta package, and go over the list manually installing whatever isn't
> going to be useless/unwelcome for my specific case.  And I will never notice
> if the metapackage changes its dependency tree later on.

You could script all that, and keep your local list up-to-date with
about ~10 minutes of work.

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