Re: Bug#29874: optional packages that should be extra
On 27 Jan 1999, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> I must confess that even I thought the the policy statement
> meant that one should be able to install all optional packages
> simultaneously.
I think this is exactly the idea Ian Jackson had in mind when he wrote
those definitions, and I think we should not abandon it, since it enhances
Debian friendliness greatly.
> Though this is a laudable goal, and indeed, was once
> achievable, but with all the packages that we have now (pushing on to
> 3000), I don't know if we can actually make the promise stick.
We will not probably be able to comply with that for slink at this point,
but if it is a laudable goal, I think we should try for potato.
For every pair of conflicting optional packages, everything we would have
to do is:
* To decide which of the two is better, cooler, or nicer, and mark the
other as extra.
* Or to repackage them so that they are compatible, like pgp-i and pgp-us
(update-alternatives is our friend).
It is true that we have many packages in this situation, but considering
that we have a *huge* number of packages (more than 2200 in main), they
are only a tiny fraction of them.
--
"7f39c9191bcc5078833a8d045941da0b" (a truly random sig)
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