Re: Too many Recommends (in particular on mail-transport-agent)
Terry McKenna <smckenna_debian@clanlineage.com> writes:
> Regarding "bloat"
>> I think we should take a test case or two to the Technical Committee.
> This one may be at the extreme, but it is one I personally encountered. I
> was installing nmap on a system (no gui) and was a bit shocked. The
> problem is well articulated by one post (an my thanks to him for the work
> around).
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=714320#17
Given that this was fixed, I'm not sure this is a great example of Debian
not dealing with this problem?
>> So I looked around in the dependency tree a little, and the eventual
>> cause is that liblinear1 recommends liblinear-tools,
lothlorien:~$ apt-cache show liblinear3 | grep liblinear-tools
Suggests: liblinear-tools (= 2.1.0+dfsg-2), liblinear-dev (= 2.1.0+dfsg-2)
>> which in turn recommends libsvm-tools,
lothlorien:~$ apt-cache show liblinear-tools | grep libsvm-tools
Suggests: libsvm-tools
It's ongoing work to track down these sorts of Recommends and get rid of
unexpected or unintended consequences, and there probably will always be
bugs. What I'm missing, as a reader of the thread, is some indication
that this is a comprehensive problem that involves a significant conflict
of opinions that needs to be escalated.
Maybe someone has a list of things they view as Recommends inflation that
have (a) been reported as bugs to the appropriate package maintainers, and
(b) have been rejected by those package maintainers? Those are the
controversial ones that we'd need to talk about.
The ones where, once someone tells them, the package maintainer goes "oh,
whoops" and changes the dependency aren't a problem. They're Debian
working as it should.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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