Re: Using "Priority: optional" in Debian GIS packages
On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 05:53:59PM +0100, Sebastiaan Couwenberg wrote:
>
> 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.
Great! Any Vcs URL?
> > 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.
Definitely.
> 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".
IMHO this is an expression of an unnecessary understatement. The Debian
archive is full of packages which are not for everybody. Perhaps we
might file a bug against policy for a better clarification. I do not
think that there is any practical case where a user says: Please
install all packages "priority: optional". That's not how installation
of systems work these days (it might have been in 1996 when I have set
up my first Debian box).
> 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.
IMHO it is better to have all packages except *-dbg and metapackages
in optional. But since this discussion started over a library anyway
please change it to optional and we can move on with the discussion
while the package is in the queue.
Kind regards
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de
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