Hi, Am Samstag, den 22.12.2012, 14:39 +0200 schrieb Andrei POPESCU: > On Sb, 22 dec 12, 13:17:32, Joachim Breitner wrote: > > Users tend to fall into one of three classes: > > A. Users that, if they have foo-dev installed, always also want > > foo-prof installed. > > B. Users that want to manually decide for what packages they want > > the -prof package and for what package not. > > C. Users who don’t want any -prof package around. > > > > Currently, we only really help user B. If user A installs foo-dev there > > is nothing that ensures that he gets foo-prof installed as well. > > And a foo-dev Recommends: foo-prof is not suitable because? because we cannot tell what the user will want. For example, a user of xmonad will not want -prof packages installed, and an addition 400MB of useless stuff on his computer is not in his, and hence our, interest. Also, a user from the class A wants a stronger guarantee than just Recommends, which is just a suggestion to the package manager, but not a a hard relation. With the i-want-all-prof-package metapackage it is guaranteed that for every -dev package, there is the corresponding -doc package installed. Am Samstag, den 22.12.2012, 13:32 +0000 schrieb Neil Williams: > IMHO, actively preventing the installation of optional dependencies is > not something which actually warrants support. I admit that use case C might not be as useful as the difference between B and A, but it doesn’t hurt either (assuming a meta-package based approach is taken for A and B). > None of these packages get installed by default, simply disabling the > installation of Recommends by default meets all the requirements of > cases B & C without making an artificial block between the two. I find this a bit coarsely grained. I might be a user in class B or C, but besides that I certainly want to follow whatever the maintainer of a package recommends me to install. Disabling the installation of Recommends would change the behavior of _all_ Debian package. I don’t think this is a good solution. Greetings, Joachim -- Joachim "nomeata" Breitner Debian Developer nomeata@debian.org | ICQ# 74513189 | GPG-Keyid: 4743206C JID: nomeata@joachim-breitner.de | http://people.debian.org/~nomeata
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