On Vi, 31 dec 10, 12:24:34, Bob Proulx wrote: > Andrei Popescu wrote: > > Bob Proulx wrote: > > > Mike Bird wrote: > > > > But then they abuse the Debian packaging system by "requiring" > > > > instead of "recommending" unnecessary packages so that people are > > > > forced to use their silly hacks. > > > > > > The new APT default is that Recommends are the same as Requires and so > > > a lot of unnecessary packages are now installed. Those should now be > > > pushed into Suggests. > > > > Feel free to file bugs for every package which abuses Recommends. Beware > > though, that Recommends, according to Policy, should be installed "on > > all but unusual installations". > > The question is really one of philosophy. Do you start with a good > foundation and then build upward? Or do you start with a large fully > filled out structure and then remove the extraneous material? From what I understand, Debian started building upward. The only problem was that apt-get for a long time did not install recommends by default. When this was eventually switched on the developers found out they suddenly have too much material and need to trim the dependencies down. The good side was that some dependencies could be degraded to recommends. And where they didn't trim up to your liking you can still use some interactive package manager (like aptitude and synaptic) to weed the recommends one by one, or even more drastic, completely disable automatic install of recommends. In my opinion we have more functionality without completely sacrificing choice. Regards, Andrei -- Offtopic discussions among Debian users and developers: http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/d-community-offtopic
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