Metapackage dependencies: "Depends" or "Recommends"?
Hi,
I recently created two metapackages (astromatic and eso-pipelines) which
were accepted by the ftp-masters yesterday. However, I got a commend
that my choice of "Recommends" dependencies is discouraged:
Paul Richards Tagliamonte <ftpmaster@ftp-master.debian.org> [1]:
> using Recomends and not Depends on the metapackage strikes me as very
> awkward. I think I get what you're trying to do (allow folks to remove
> one package they don't want, I guess), but I really don't think that's
> quite right.
What is the rationale behind this? From the policy, I would think that
"Recommends" is the perfect dependency here [2]:
| Recommends
| This declares a strong, but not absolute, dependency. The Recommends
| field should list packages that would be found together with this one
| in all but unusual installations.
Why should one use the much stronger "Depends" here?
Best regards
Ole
[1] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/debian-astro-maintainers/Week-of-Mon-20150727/001597.html
[2] https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html
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