Re: Should we allow packages to depend on packages with lower priority values?
On Mon, 8 Dec 2003 17:21:28 +0100 (CET), Santiago Vila
<sanvila@unex.es> wrote:
>On Mon, 8 Dec 2003, Marc Haber wrote:
>> Policy 2.5 says that packages must not depend on packages with lower
>> priority values. From what I tried to research, that rule is meant to
>> allow CD builders to build "Debian foo standard" CDs containing
>> required, important and standard packages, guaranteed that all
>> dependencies are satisfied just from choosing from the Priority.
>
>Not only that, combined with the rule saying "packages which conflicts
>with optional or higher should be extra", people should be able to
>forget completely about extra packages when choosing packages without
>having unmet dependencies.
Why should they be able to forget about extra packages. I don't see
any place where this matters, except CD creation.
>> Now let's look at a system where the local administrator has decided
>> to use B instead of A. Since E and F are Priority: important, dselect
>> happily proceeds to install E and F on the system, even if they are
>> not needed since the system in question uses B instead of A.
>
>So you want postfix but not the dependencies for exim?
This is just an example.
>Just tell dselect to uninstall E and F. Where is the problem?
Manual intervention is necessary here. Most people will see this as a
bad bug in the E and F packages.
>You will only have to do this once and dselect will remember that you
>don't want E and F installed (unless they are required later by another
>package).
Everybody using B will have to do this once.
>The dependency rule is still useful for those who trust Debian having
>good defaults and want to forget about extra packages.
Why would anybody want to forget about extra packages?
>The deborphan package provides a much better way of getting rid of
>unwanted packages which are installed only because of dependencies,
>have not you tried it?
I am locally using debfoster. But not all people do that.
Greetings
Marc
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Marc Haber | " Questions are the | Mailadresse im Header
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