Re: Too many Recommends (in particular on mail-transport-agent)
On Tue, 2017-06-06 at 00:14 -0400, Afif Elghraoui wrote:
> I see now that python-networkx has some integration with those
> visualization libraries [1], which is not what I expected to be the
> case, though the page also says:
>
> ~~~
> NetworkX provides basic functionality for visualizing graphs, but its
> main goal is to enable graph analysis rather than perform graph
> visualization. In the future, graph visualization functionality may be
> removed from NetworkX or only available as an add-on package.
> ~~~
>
> so I guess until that integration is removed, it makes sense to keep it
> as Recommends. My main problem remains, however, and it is that networkx
> brings in a graphics stack when you try to install pbhoney on a headless
> machine, like cluster compute nodes.
Given this is a Python package, we should not even have to argue about
package relationships. Setuptools metadata provides install_requires
and extras_require, the former mapping to Depends, the latter to
Suggests. Period.
Your typical Python project README would instruct users to install the
Python package via `pip install`. If one runs `pip install networkx`,
the graphics dependencies do not get pulled. That alone is enough to
justify that these dependencies should not go to Recommends.
FYI, I have a similar problem with sympy (#861741), which pulls an
insane amount of packages via chained Recommends.
Ghis
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