"recommends" in current potato.
In potato now, there are at least five of those "recommends"
dependencies. What is this function for? The explanation in 'man
deb-control' doesn't provide an example of why this nagging
"recommends" dependency is useful. If the installer wants to override
a "recommends" just like a "suggests", then we should be allowed to do
so. Otherwise we have to go through this override procedure every
time on a dependency resolution screen after a (select)ion. If the
"recommended" package is *not* strictly necessary for the operation of
the subject package, then dselect/dpkg should only complain once, and
after that it should shut-up. Look at the current examples that I'm
dealing with now on my system (every time I update my system), and
tell me how a "recommends" makes more sense then a simple "suggests":
fvwmconf recommends imagemagick
I already have eeyes and gimp, I don't need another image
manipulation/display program. If fvwmconf does *not* actually use
imagemagick (which would make it a "depends") then it this should just
be a "suggests".
python-numeric-tutorial recommends python-imaging-tk
Does the tutorial actually use something from python-imaging-tk? If
I'm not interested in tcl/tk stuff why can't I leave this out? With
this "recommends", a series of dependencies ensue, which ends with
dselect wanting to install the entire old version of tcl8.0 and
tk8.0! I don't see an obvious tutorial in
/usr/share/doc/python-numeric (pointed to by
python-numeric-tutorial). There's a *.pdf file that is detailed
documentation which ghostview (gv) handles perfectly. So why
*imaging-tk?
a2ps recommends psutils
a2ps works wonderfully with the few plain text files I threw at it,
*without* psutils installed. Why psutils? If there is something in
psutils which makes using a2ps *much* more useful/easy/better quality,
then the description for a2ps should *say* so, so the user understands
why a2ps wants psutils with it.
gnome-session recommends gmc
Gnome doesn't need gmc, I've been running Gnome for weeks without
it. Yet dselect has been bugging me about it for the last 2 weeks or
so. Strictly speaking, you don't need a file manager to run Gnome (at
least for now). Besides. gmc is going away at some point in the
future, anyway, according to an interview with someone on the Gnome
team on /. (or LinuxToday) recently.
xscreensaver recommends xli, xloadimage or xv
xcreensaver looks like its working fine without the above
recommendations, Gnome uses it automatically so I've seen it working a
lot. So why do I need one of the above image manipulation programs?
Why not eeyes or gimp? If the only reason they are recommended is
their ability to set or dump images to/from the root window, why
doesn't the description in xscreensaver say that so the user
understands the reason for the "recommends", but even then, this
should still be just a "suggests".
At this point in time, I really do not understand the reasoning for
the "recommends" dependency.
Do you think these warrant a bug report, do you agree that the
"recommends" dependency is at least problematic, is it a
misunderstanding by me of the importance of "recommends", or am I just
whining (again)? :-)
--
Ed C.
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