On Fri, 22 Apr 2005, Thijs Kinkhorst wrote:
I tend to disagree here - it can be fine to use Recommends or Suggests if only a small part of your package doesn't work without them. For example in the SquirrelMail package we've made ispell and php-pear Recommends resp Suggests, because if you don't use the spell checker or a database backend, SquirrelMail runs just fine. We just had to make sure that SquirrelMail fails gracefully if you attempt to use this functionality without the packages (it outputs an error suggesting to install the needed package).
OK, this is a reasonable fallback because the user is informaed what happens.
The question is whether it might really make sense to patch upstream software
only for the sake of using Recommends / Suggests instead of Depends. It might
be error prone and you win nearly nothing (as I said: ImageMagick and ghostscript
are not so extraordinary packages on image processing machines that it
would make any sense to leave them out.
Kind regards
Andreas.
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