Bug#273734: education-common: con't fulfill the Recommends on !i386
On Sun, Oct 03, 2004 at 12:44:21PM +0100, Martin Michlmayr wrote:
> * Adrian Bunk <adrian.bunk@stusta.de> [2004-10-03 03:22]:
> > 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.
>
> You certainly have a good point here. I'm not suggesting to remove
> Recommends; I think the concept of Recommends is good. However, there
> is also a difference between Depends and Recommends. I think what I'd
> like to see is:
>
> Depends -> grave bug
> Recommends -> normal (or important) bug
> Suggests -> minor
>
> Recommends is stronger than Suggests but it doesn't completely break
> the package so imho it shouldn't be RC.
It depends on how strong you expect a Recommends to be. My impression
was, it's a "install the recommended package unless you really know what
you are doing".
And it's currently supported that in order to aid users a package
management tool might handle recommends like dependencies. If this
should continue to be supported, they have to be treated the same way.
Besides this, the practical impact of having these bugs RC isn't big:
Nearly all such bugs I've seen were either wrong recommends (typo,
package renamed, unneeded recommends) or real problems. In the first
case the fix is trivial, and in the second case a solution is really
required.
The only exception cases I've are recommends of kernel module packages
where only the module source is shipped in Debian, but in these cases
I'd argue in favor of downgrading these recommends to suggests.
The fact that the testing scripts currently don't handle Recommends the
same way as Depends is IMHO a bug similar to the more severe bug that
the testing scripts don't handle build dependencies similar to
dependencies.
> Martin Michlmayr
cu
Adrian
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