The following message is a courtesy copy of an article
that has been posted to gmane.linux.debian.devel.general as well.
tag 439389 help
stop
Sebastian Dröge <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>> Would it make sense to demote the dependency on the hal daemon to a
>> Recommends (after all, the hal "client" library should deal with the
>> daemon not running anyway)?
>
> In one of the cases I found this won't be correct:
>
> gnome-mount depends on hal as it doesn't work at all without hal.
>
> libnautilus-burn should depend on gnome-mount as it can't do some stuff
> if gnome-mount is not available. If this is a recommends only, people
> that don't install recommends have a unusable library lying around.
I think this problem is similar to #439389 in xine-lib (RC, help
really appreciated):
- libxine1 only depends on libraries, that it really needs. This
leaves users that don't install the recommended packages in the
situation, that they cannot play their mp3/ogg/etc files.
- Promoting them to depends causes them to be installed in any case,
which is unwanted in special-use situations (think embedded or
special purpose multimedia center installations).
- leaving them as recommends causes xine frontends not only to build
faster (fewer dependencies to be installed), but also to build more
reliably (as you aren't affected by some potential library
transition, happened several times in the past.
In conclusion: I think we are facing a very similar problem, but we are
solving it differently: You prefer to not annoy users which don't
respect recommends, and I urge/force people to install recommends if
they want to have a usable frontend. Can we perhaps reach a broader
consensus on this type of decisions?
Ideally, we can clarify this in the Developers Reference.
--
Gruesse/greetings,
Reinhard Tartler, KeyID 945348A4
