Re: Installation of Recommends by default on October 1st
On Thu, Aug 02, 2007 at 01:20:16PM -0700, Matt Taggart wrote:
>
> Michael Vogt writes...
>
> > As you may be aware of, the latest version of apt in unstable and
> > testing supports installing of recommends by default now.
>
> Sorry if I missed something but why is this being done?
Its a long standing issue in apt that it does not honor
recommends properly. This is a violation against the debian
policy. The problem here is probably that apt ignore recommends since
so long that its assumed that this is correct behaviour (aptitude got
this right a lot earlier btw).
> Won't this make Depends and Recommends the same?
Sorry, I did not explain that properly in my mail. The difference is
that if package A recommends package B, then you remove package B and
apt will not complain. If package B is a depends then apt will
complain (or remove A). Its just a weaker form of dependency that
gives us more flexibility. Apt will also tolerate if a recommends can
not be found.
> I guess before Recommends and Suggests were roughly the same, but now you
> are changing the default to install more things on the system by default?
Correct, before apt essentially ignored recommends and suggests. Now
it honor them.
> For the default case, do we want to err on the side of installing too much
> or on the side of installing only what's needed and making people install
> the recommends by hand?
The policy say:
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.
My reading of this is that we should install recommends by
default. The fact that a lot of recommends are currently declared that
are no real recommends ("in all but unusual installations") is the
problem here IMHO.
> Debian has always been about installing only what you need as opposed to
> some of the other distros who install a couple CDs worth of stuff by
> default. Many aspects of debian depend on this idea, like the fact that
> start servers by default rather than use something like RH/SuSE's
> "chkconfig" tool.
This feature gives us more flexiblity. We will have to cleanup some of
the recommends, but that should be fine, we have plenty of time and
the tools to easily see what recommends comes from where etc.
> Again, sorry if I missed a list discussion, I just don't remember this
> being discussed.
There has been a discussion about this on debian-devel when I
described the new features in apt 0.7. At this point is was decided
that recommends-by-default is not a good idea how without a transtion
period. This is why this mail was written :)
Cheers,
Michael
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