Re: Bug#504042: perl-doc recommendation
On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 6:24 PM, Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org> wrote:
> Brendan meant:
> "apt-get install perl" should install perl-doc because the user is
> interested in perl but "apt-get install dpkg-dev" which does also depend
> on perl should not install perl-doc because perl-doc is not really related
> to dpkg-dev.
Exactly.
> While it's an interesting idea, I don't think it's really worth the
> complexity.
On reflection, this is really a UI issue and an additional control
field should not be necessary. More complex UIs like aptitude, or the
venerable dselect handle this by punting the choice on a case-by case
basis to the user... apt-get is a bit more coarse.
Perhaps APT::Install-Recommends should be a tri-state: "always | never
| direct" rather than a boolean to achieve the same result. With
"direct" of course selecting only recommended packages which are
direct dependencies of the packages given on the command line.
Or, as you say, it may not be worth the effort. Disk these days is
relatively cheap, and perl-doc is all of 8M. Special cases require
special handling--If disk space, or network bandwidth is really of
such a premium, then perhaps a more judicious manual selection is
required by the user.
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