Bug#759260: [summary] Bug#759260: removal of the Extra priority.

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 10:48:15PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> One of the potential uses of the Extra priority was to allow for
> co-installing all packages down to the Optional priority.  However,
> this goal is not seem realistic anymore given the current size of
> the Debian archive, and indeed, no concrete example (that is, not
> just a though experiment or a single exploratory attempt) of relying
> on this co-installability was given.

No. There is a little bit (or a lot) of confusion here.

It's true that the extra priority, together with the rule saying there
should not be conflicts among optional or higher packages, would allow
installing all the optional packages.

But being able to install all the optional packages is not the *goal*
itself.

The purpose is to allow the user to install as many optional packages
as he/she wants without having to bother with conflicts.

Obviously, if the set of optional or higher packages has the priority
that you can install all of them (theoretically), then it follows
naturally that every subset of such set which is closed regarding
dependencies also has such property.

As I said the day before yesterday in another thread, installing all
the optional packages (which may be technically difficult because of
the current archive size) is not actually *required* for this property
to be useful.

Therefore I object to dropping the extra priority.

Thanks.