Re: weekly policy summary
Francesco Tapparo <cesco@goldnet.it> writes:
> The documentation is a better place for this sort of things.
> >From the packaging manual:
>
> `Suggests'
> This is used to declare that one package may be more useful with
> one or more others. Using this field tells the packaging system
> and the user that the listed packages are be related to this one
> and can perhaps enhance its usefulness, but that installing this
> one without them is perfectly reasonable.
>
> dselect will offer suggsted packages to the system administrator
> when they select the suggesting package, but the default is not
> to install the suggested package.
>
> My complaint is that dselect offer to install the Suggested package, hinting
> to the user to install it: this strike again the Debian spirit.
Gimp is far more usefull with gif support, so if the suggest where
missing, I would file a bug. Thats exactly what suggests is for. gimp
works with and without gif support, but with it can write gifs.
What you want is a flag in dselect to not show non-free packages, I
think removing non-free from your package list will do that. I thing
even that dselect doesn't show you suggests that can't be met. (which
I think is bad, because you loose information, a switch for it would
be better).
> > is an alternative that I might use. Without a suggest one might never
> > know that there is a non-free programm outthere doing the jobs one
> > needs.
>
> Again: /usr/doc/package is the better location of information related to
> thed package. Suggest is a suggestion to install something to exploit
> the usefulness of some package.
Nobody reads /usr/doc/package, especially not while browsing through
the package list with dselect. I don't want to install 200 packages
(go online, update, download, go offline, unpack, configure), read
their manual in case I missed some non-free or contrib part, install
another 20 packages (go online, download, go offline, ...) then
another 10... and so on.
Thats stupid. I want to know what I might miss at the time when I
install stuff, not two years later.
May the Source be with you.
Goswin
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