Whether or not you think that we should have a nice front end for
apt-get, it seems that based on this line from policy:
Recommends
This declares a strong, but not absolute, dependency.
The Recommends field should list packages that would be found together
with this one in all but unusual installations.
it makes perfect sense to have a --recommends flag.
to give you an example, I just installed the new experimental X 4.3.0
packages, and the xlibmesa dri drivers were, correctly, moved into a
new package name, xlibmesa4-dri. These are not an absolute dependency
since you can use libGL in xlibmesa4 for 2d, you need the
xlibmesa4-dri package to actually do 3d. In this case, it would have
helped tremendously to be able to install the recommends.
The discussion in this bug seems to discuss suggests more than
recommends, but I think that the lack of a recommends option is more
of a bug, since those packages are explicitly important
dependencies. It seems that if we don't have tools that handle
recommends correctly, we need to change policy to make our packages
more usable.
--
michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com
hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer
people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted email preferred
"O to be delivered from the rational into the realm of pure song..."
- Theodore Roethke
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