Re: Bug#504880: Disambiguate "installed" for packages
Russ Allbery wrote:
> Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:
>> My real question was: does this ever happen in the real world?
>
>> - doc-base already removes any remaining state when *it* is purged
>> - debconf does not, but that is a bug. In practice, debconf is
>> almost never uninstalled.
>
>> My worry is that people will start depending on such packages “just in
>> case”. Recommends seems better for this purpose since there are already
>> no guarantees.
>
> Steve should probably respond here since he's the one who raised the
> issue. I'm not at all happy with using Recommends for this purpose, and I
> suspect that the suggestion to use Recommends indicates a bug in my
> wording. Maybe I needed a stronger word than desirable?
>
> As Steve pointed out, this is generally going to be a no-op, since if
> you're cleaning something up in postrm, you probably already depended on
> it because you're using it in postinst.
Example where it is not a no-op: doc-base
In that example, neither Recommends nor Depends is appropriate, true.
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