Re: Should we allow packages to depend on packages with lower priority values?
On Tue, 9 Dec 2003 12:56:07 +0100 (CET), Santiago Vila
<sanvila@unex.es> wrote:
>Because the fact that there should not be conflicts among optional or
>higher packages often forces Debian to choose which one, among a set
>of packages which conflict at each other, should be the optional or
>the standard one and put all the others in extra.
I see your point.
>By choosing only among optional or higher packages (i.e. forgetting
>about extra), a novice user which want to avoid problems will:
>
>a) find at least some "recommended" package for every task for which
>there are several incompatible packages.
>
>b) not need to bother about resolving conflicts at all.
>
>This is not about CD creation at all.
So this should be supported by a package selecting utility that could
be configured to not display any low priority packages, but to pull in
packages if they are depended on.
I see, if an extra package is depended on that conflicts with a
standard package, we are in for a problem.
How about relaxing the priority depends rule to:
"Packages of priority required, important, standard and optional must
not depend on packages with priority extra". In my example, E and F
could be Priority optional then, which is the appropriate value.
>> >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.
>
>Most people would see that as a bug if dselect didn't honor your
>request of uninstalling E and F, but dselect does honor such requests.
So people are required to manually undo mindless automatic
installations because of a broken priority setting?
>> >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.
>
>They don't really *have* to do it. Packages E and F will typically be
>libraries, which do nothing if no package uses them. Having them
>installed is completely harmless.
If you think asking a bunch of debconf questions that will never be
actually used and taking up hard disk space and inodes is harmless,
yes.
>They can remove E and F if they don't want to have them installed, but
>this has only to be made *once*.
Once per installation which can be a major nuisance.
>I don't understand why you make such a big problem from uninstalling a
>package which you don't want. Why don't you just propose to downgrade
>all important and standard packages to optional, then, since
>uninstalling those which you don't want is such a big problem?
The major problem for me is that this installation happens on already
installed systems. For new installations, pulling in the packages is
fine - when I do a new installation, I expect to uninstall a bunch of
unwanted packages. During an upgrade, I expect that only these new
packages are installed that are really needed. Usually, this is what
Debian does.
Greetings
Marc
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