On Wed, Dec 29, 1999 at 08:10:09AM +0000, Ed Cogburn wrote:
> 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
The difference is supposed to be between "This other package may come in
handy" and "You can leave this other package uninstalled, but you almost
certainly don't want to".
It often gets used when major features of a package depend upon another
package but it is possible to use the package without them. An example
is my mpich package. It's a parallel processing library which depends
upon rsh to start parallel jobs. You can use it to do development and
run single-processor jobs without rsh, but you'll almost certainly want
to at least try running jobs using more than one processor (even if you
only have one physical processor).
> 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":
dselect's handling of Recommends: sucks - it won't take no for an answer.
> 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)? :-)
I'd suggest at least contacting the maintainers. I can't speak for
other developers, but I almost always find suggestions from users
helpful.
--
Mark Brown mailto:broonie@tardis.ed.ac.uk (Trying to avoid grumpiness)
http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~broonie/
EUFS http://www.eusa.ed.ac.uk/societies/filmsoc/
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