Bug#273734: education-common: con't fulfill the Recommends on !i386

[Adrian Bunk <adrian.bunk@stusta.de>]

On Fri, Oct 01, 2004 at 10:39:31AM +0100, Martin Michlmayr wrote:
>...
> [*] However, I think Policy should be changed to requre Depends only
> and not Recommends.  In the past, dselect would scream loudly about
> Recommends not being fulfilled but these days the tools don't really
> care as much anymore.


This would imply the former Recommends handling in dselect was only a 
bug.

I'd disagree with this:


Recommends/Suggests on another package have roughly the following 
semantics:
- "Suggests" means it might be nice to additionally install the package
- "Recommends" means you should install the package unless you really 
  know what you are doing

Looking through the Debian archive, there seems to be the need for these 
two different semantics. The old dselect handling might have sometimes 
been annoying, but it helped users to be on the sfe side regarding 
dependencies.


If you change policy to make Recommends similar to Suggests, you might 
even remove Recommends from policy since there will no longer be a real 
difference between Recommends and Suggests.


> Martin Michlmayr

cu
Adrian

-- 

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       "Only a promise," Lao Er said.
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