Re: Using "Priority: optional" in Debian GIS packages
Hi,
On 11/21/2013 11:07 AM, Andreas Tille wrote:
> as far as I know there is no written policy for Debian GIS as I know
> this from Debian Med which should be probably fixed in the not so far
> future. I'd recommend to use the Debian Med policy from [1] as template
> and adapt what needs to be changed. This was done at some point in time
> when Debian Med adapted from Debian Perl team ... which might another
> valuable template as well.
I have work-in-progress policy for Debian GIS, it's forked from the
Debian Med policy, but it's not fully adjusted for Debian GIS yet.
> The actual point I want to make when I was just sponsering librasterlite
> is, that Bas has set "Priority: extra" which is IMHO not a good idea at
> all and thus we have some explicit statement about the priority to
> choose[2]. If there are no good reasons I'd (strongly) recommend to
> settle with "Priority: optional" in all Debian GIS packages.
So far most Debian GIS packages use "Priority: extra", the QA checks are
a good reason to consider "Priority: optional" instead.
Regarding the optional and extra priorities policy states:
"
optional
(In a sense everything that isn't required is optional, but that's
not what is meant here.) This is all the software that you might
reasonably want to install if you didn't know what it was and don't
have specialized requirements. This is a much larger system and
includes the X Window System, a full TeX distribution, and many
applications. Note that optional packages should not conflict with
each other.
extra
This contains all packages that conflict with others with required,
important, standard or optional priorities, or are only likely to
be useful if you already know what they are or have specialized
requirements (such as packages containing only detached debugging \
symbols).
Packages must not depend on packages with lower priority values
(excluding build-time dependencies). In order to ensure this, the
priorities of one or more packages may need to be adjusted.
"
An argument against using the optional priority is that I don't think
that GIS software is something "that you might reasonably want to
install if you didn't know what it was and don't have specialized
requirements".
I think it's a good idea to at least use "Priority: optional" for the
library packages to allow "Priority: extra" packages to depend on them
without violating policy.
> Kind regards
>
> Andreas.
>
> [1] svn://svn.debian.org/svn/debian-med/trunk/community/website/docs
> [2] http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org/docs/policy.html#policy
Kind Regards,
Bas
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