Re: Too many Recommends (in particular on mail-transport-agent)

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Ian Jackson writes ("Re: Too many Recommends (in particular on mail-transport-agent)"):
> Jeremy Bicha writes ("Re: Too many Recommends (in particular on mail-transport-agent)"):
> > I think you're looking at this from the opposite perspective that I
> > am. If you intent to ask the TC to override a Debian maintainer, I
> > think your arguments need to be much more detailed and documented on
> > the bug why you believe it to be that critical of an issue.
> 
> Recommends bloat as a whole is a serious problem for the whole
> project.  This is true even though the problem caused by each
> individual instance is small.
> 
> Our second-line institutional structures (after individual
> maintainers) for dealing with _classes_ of problem are policy (which
> is already very clear IMO on this, but is often not followed);
> automation (lintian, buildds, rebuild tests, etc); and peer review
> (d-devel); and ftpmaster review (not applicable to existing packages
> and I don't think they focus on this).
> 
> Unfortunately Recommends abuse is too subjective to be readily
> amenable to the latter.
           to automated assessment.

Ian.