Re: [carlos.borroto@gmail.com: [SCM] tophat branch, oneiric-ppa, updated. oneiric-ppa/1.4.0-1_oneiric3-3-g3edf06d]

[Carlos Borroto <carlos.borroto@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 5:31 AM, Andreas Tille <andreas@an3as.eu> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 07, 2012 at 06:27:09PM -0500, Carlos Borroto wrote:
>>
>> Oh, I didn't realize adding something to Recommends implies it will
>> get installed by default just as a dependency.
>
> Aptitude and apt-get (as well as the GUI tools depending on them) are
> installing Depends and Recommends.  You can force ignoring Recommends
> via
>
>   apt-get --no-install-recommends
>
> or use APT::Install-Recommends in apt.conf.  However, we can safely
> assume that recommends will be installed by our target user.  Those
> users who are ignoring Recommends usually know what they are doing.
>
> As a consequence of this logic all packages your are listing as
> Depends and Recommends need to be in Debian main - otherwise it needs
> to go to contrib.
>
>> How can I get a
>> "Suggested packages: cufflinks" when apt-getting tophat? Is Enhances
>> mean for this?
>
> If you want to suggest a package simply list it as
>
>  Suggests: cufflinks
>
> You can suggest packages from contrib or non-free or even from
> "somewhere else" - policy does not enforce suggested packages inside
> Debian main.  However, a user who tries to install using
>
>  apt-get --install-suggests
>
> and does not include non-free in its sources.list will fail installing
> this suggested package.
>
>> I don't think tophat needs to be a Depends in cufflinks, as you could
>> be interested in the analysis of BAM files you didn't create or BAM
>> files not created with tophat. In order to run cufflinks you don't
>> need tophat at all. It could be a "suggestion"(Enhances?) thou, as
>> cufflinks authors do recommend mapping with tophat.
>
> The field "Enhances" is kind of a "Reverse-Suggests".  I usually do
> something like:
>
>  Package: xy
>  Suggests: xy-doc
>
>  Package: xy-doc
>  Enhances: xy
>
> So in your case it might be useful to do:
>
>  Package: cufflinks
>  Enhances: tophat
>
> which means exactly what you wrote:  tophat is not needed for running
> cufflinks but on a system running tophat it makes sense to install
> cufflinks.
>
> The Enhances field is not (yet) widely used but it makes perfectly sense
> to specify it because it can give better hints for aptitude/apt-get
> dependency solvers and other tools like axi-cache (xapian index).
>
> Kind regards
>
>     Andreas.
>

Great detailed explanation. Thanks a lot for taking the time to write
it. I fixed tophat by switching cufflinks to Suggests, and enhanced
cufflinks by adding tophat to Enhances.

Thanks,
Carlos