Bug#211398: openoffice.org-mimelnk: Mimelnk package should suggest OOo, not recommend it

[Ben Burton <bab@debian.org>]

Package: openoffice.org-mimelnk
Version: 1.0.99+1.1rc3-1
Severity: normal

[ I've already chatted with Rene on IRC about this, but I'm filing a
report so that myself and koffice users can more easily track the issue. ]

Hi.  Currently openoffice.org-mimelnk recommends openoffice.org.
According to debian policy (7.2):

  The Recommends field should list packages that would be found together
  with this one in all but unusual installations.

  [Suggests] is used to declare that one package may be more useful with one
  or more other ... but that installing this one without them is
  perfectly reasonable.

The mimelnk files basically inform KDE of which files are in fact OOo
files so that it knows that they can be opened in OOo, KOffice or other
OOo-aware apps.  This is basically a convenience for users and does not
require OOo in any way (e.g., if you are importing OOo docs into kword).
Indeed it is quite common for users to have many more registered
mimetypes than apps that can handle them.

In this sense it seems that suggests, not recommends, is the correct
form of dependency to use.

The use of recommends does in fact have deeper ramifications for users
of package management tools that enforce recommendations (which IMHO is
not such a bad thing since - as policy says - users should have recommends
installed in all but unusual situations).  An example of such a tool is
dselect (AIUI, dselect enforces recommends but not suggests).

For these users, installing the very small mimelnk package will cause
the installation of the very large OOo package.  Furthermore, for
koffice (which I maintain), I have koffice-data recommends
openoffice.org-mimelnk since these mimelnk files help the various
import/export filters run smoothly.  In this case, installing any
koffice application would have the effect of installing all of OOo as
well.

For this reason I would appreciate notification if you don't plan to
change the dependency so that I can downgrade the koffice recommends to
a suggests before sarge starts to freeze - there are many people using
dselect, and an unintentional OOo installation is quite a hit on both disk
space and bandwidth.  Though for the reasons described earlier it does
seem that changing OOo-mimelnk's recommends to a suggests is the correct
solution.

Thanks - Ben. :)

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
Architecture: i386
Kernel: Linux skaro 2.4.22-1-686 #1 Fri Sep 5 23:04:29 EST 2003 i686
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C

-- no debconf information