Re: Recommends for metapackages
Thibaut Paumard <mlotpot.news@free.fr> writes:
> Le 12/07/12 11:06, Gergely Nagy a écrit :
>> Lets consider another case! Suppose I have Install-Recommends turned on,
>> and install a theoretical meta package, that has half of its stuff in
>> recommends, because they're not strictly necessary, but merely enhance
>> the system. Lets suppose one of these enhancements include a tool I use
>> every once in a while, but not daily.
>
> A later upgrade to your beloved meta-package could very well drop this
> dependency.
While that may happen, that is far more unlikely than the case I
outlined, and a case I can live with.
> If that's a tool that you know you want, I strongly suggest
> you mark it as manually installed.
Problem is, at the time I installed the meta, I did not know about this
particular tool. It came with the platform, and I really do not want to
care which part of the platform it is.
It came with it, I expect it will stay as long as it is part of the
platform.
Recommends breaks that assumption.
>> As for why I wouldn't notice? Because I trust the system to do the right
>> thing, and I do automatic, unattended upgrades. Not an uncommon thing to
>> do, I believe.
>
> You should always check what your package manager wants to remove.
Why? In my setup, it will never remove things that are not marked
auto-install. I ensure that my system works, by having all dependencies
satisfied. (And any recommends or suggests I do need, I install by hand)
I do unattended upgrades for a reason: I don't want to spend time on
double-guessing something that should work automatically.
> In my experience, more often than not, aptitude tries to remove the
> full gnome metapackage because of a temporarily unavailable depends.
Well, mine won't do that, as I don't have gnome marked auto-install, so
it will abort the upgrade instead.
However, if things would move down to Recommends, it would happily
proceed to remove things I do use, just because I didn't install it by
hand...
And here we get back to the same issue others had: manual
bookkeeping. But this time, with recommends.
So pray tell me, how is Recommends any better, when I have to resort to
manual bookkeeping anyway?
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