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

[Afif Elghraoui <afif@debian.org>]

على الإثنين  5 حزيران 2017 ‫09:52، كتب Scott Kitterman:
>> The answer to that is not clear from the maintainer's response; nor is
>> it clear from what the submitter has written whether they know the
>> answer.
> Why is that question relevant?  The policy definition of Recommends (versus 
> Suggests) has nothing to with if there will be a failure or not:
> 
>> The Recommends field should list packages that would be found together with
>> this one in all but unusual installations

That's not the complete definition of Recommends. The part you left out
states that there should be a strong, but not absolute dependency.
Presumably their being almost always found together on all but unusual
installations is a consequence of that.

> Personally, I think the maintainer articulated what he views as the usual 
> situation and declines to remove Recommends that are, in the maintainer's 
> view, appropriate.  His rationale makes complete sense to me.
>  I'm not saying 
> there aren't other, reasonable choices that could be made, but it make sense.  
> I don't think this is the kind of thing the TC should even entertain 
> overruling a maintainer on.

It's not about targeting the maintainer. It's about clarifying what
should be done. I'd be happy to know whether I should have turned the
pbhoney Recommends into a Depends to avoid unwarranted fallback behavior
when people disable Recommends to avoid numerous unneeded packages.

regards
Afif

-- 
Afif Elghraoui | عفيف الغراوي
http://afif.ghraoui.name