On Sun, Mar 25, 2001 at 06:58:29PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: > On Sun, Mar 25, 2001 at 03:50:34AM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: > > You seem to be explicitly ignoring the third option (the first listed). Why? > > *shrug* It's not clear to me that it's possible in these cases. In the case of tetex-bin: Have you checked lately to see how many programs within it *actually* depend on the X libraries? In the case of emacs20: * it could be made an exception, and permitted to violate dependency closure under standard * a minimalistic version could be created that doesn't link against Xlib (emacs-tiny ?! perish the thought), and the emacs20 as we know it now downgraded to optional * its priority could just plain be downgraded to optional (yes, I realize this would deeply offend the esthetic of the Faithful; still, it's an option) * we could talk to the package maintainer and get his opinion on the subject Also, I strongly suspect emacs users are not the types who shy away from large downloads. You have not made it clear to me how this policy proposal fails to be an improvement on the previous text. Because it fails to resolve a specific problem that Debian has had for many years, and which is apparently a source of personal annoyance to you, does not seem to me a sufficient condition for opposition. Furthermore, it is worth noting that the very definitions of our package priorities reference these same 3 packages *explicitly*: important Important programs, including those which one would expect to find on any Unix-like system. If the expectation is that an experienced Unix person who found it missing would say `What the F*!@<+ is going on, where is foo', it must be in important. This is an important criterion because we are trying to produce, amongst other things, a free Unix. Other packages without which the system will not run well or be usable must also be here. This does not include Emacs, the X Window System, TeX or any other large applications. The important packages are just a bare minimum of commonly-expected and necessary tools. standard These packages provide a reasonably small but not too limited character-mode system. This is what will install by default if the user doesn't select anything else. It doesn't include many large applications, but it does include Emacs (this is more of a piece of infrastructure than an application) and a reasonable subset of TeX and LaTeX (if this is possible without X). optional (In a sense everything is optional that isn't required, but that's not what is meant here.) This is all the software that you might reasonably want to install if you didn't know what it was or don't have specialized requirements. This is a much larger system and includes the X Window System, a full TeX distribution, and many applications. Note that optional packages should not conflict with each other. If I'd wanted to modify policy 2.2, I'd have made a proposal to modify policy 2.2. There is not a proposal to modify policy 2.2 pending. You'll note that my proposal would make it so that this X policy no longer mentions any priorities specifically, so you're free to try to promote emacs to important, downgrade it to optional, or leave it where it is. -- G. Branden Robinson | When dogma enters the brain, all Debian GNU/Linux | intellectual activity ceases. branden@debian.org | -- Robert Anton Wilson http://www.debian.org/~branden/ |
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