Re: insserv + apache2 + bind9 = pain
Hi,
On Sat, Jan 01, 2011 at 03:29:21PM +0200, Andrei Popescu wrote:
I know you know very well on Debian system but may not be old enough to
use dselect with dpkg-ftp etc :-) So some historic comments differ from
what I thought.
> 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.
Debian installation was to install recommends by default as I remember.
That was the reason why dselect was the default and apt was not for
installation for good long time. This upcoming release note uses
apt-get since its behavior is OK now and aptitude is not optimal for
non-interactive session.
> 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.
What happened (as I understand) was while apt-get was widely used by
power users, many package maintainers started to abuse "recommend" when
they should have used "suggests". That was sloppy and we need to file
bug report on such packages. I see some packages use recommends too
casually.
> 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.
Both apt-get and aptitude can chose to install recommends. It is just
easier with aptitude etc.
> In my opinion we have more functionality without completely sacrificing
> choice.
I agree.
Osamu
Reply to: