Re: Too many Recommends (in particular on mail-transport-agent)
AFAIK, mdadm's default (and maybe only supported, without some custom scripting) way to report a degraded array is email. That's definitely an important feature as not noticing a degraded array will result in complete data loss (well, or at least restore from backup).
OTOH, seems weird for Dracut to recommend mdadm. Surely a system booting from RAID would already have it installed?
On May 30, 2017 7:57:03 AM EDT, Ansgar Burchardt <ansgar@debian.org> wrote:
>Hi,
>
>my impression is that too many packages use Recommends that should
>really be Suggests. As a random example: installing dracut as a
>initramfs provider will pull in exim4... (dracut-core Recommends: mdadm
>which Recommends: default-mta | mail-transport-agent). This seems
>really not ideal.
>
>As a result many people seem to disable installing recommended packages
>by default. I believe we should be much more agressive in downgrading
>dependencies to Suggests.
>
>For example, very few packages should Depend/Recommend a MTA: if you
>just send notifications (like mdadm), you would need a properly
>configured MTA anyway or they just end up in a file nobody will ever
>look at (I don't see local mail to root as very useful).
>
>I suggest that only very few packages should Recommend a MTA: packages
>that mainly deal with mail on servers in some way or another (for
>user-facing applications, speaking SMTP to a remote SMTP server is
>common enough that these shouldn't Recommend a MTA usually either).
>
>Ansgar
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