reassign 459707 xmms
retitle 459707 xmms: please split off libxmms into its own package
severity wishlist
thanks

Hi,

On Tue, Jan 08, 2008 at 09:58:43AM +0100, Max Kellermann wrote:
> collectd recommends libgtk1.2 and xmms.  These two should never be
> installed on a server, and aptitude by default selects all recommended
> packages.  This might lead to accidently installing xmms (and all the
> gtk and x11 stuff) on a server.  Please make that less likely by
> degrading some of the "recommends" to "suggests".

All of those recommendations are dependencies of collectd's plugins as
identified by dpkg-shlibdeps. Currently, libxmms (required by the "xmms"
plugin) is shipped inside the "xmms" binary package. Thus, this package has to
be installed to fulfill the requirements of the plugin and, therefore, ended
up in recommends. This way, novice users will be able to install and use
collectd without further thinking about the dependencies of each plugin -
advanced users, on the other hand, may make fine-grained decisions about any
extra packages they want to pull in.

Imho, the best solution for this would be to have a separate package for
libxmms which then can be used by packages like collectd which use the library
only. That's why I reassigned the bug.

This situation will further improve if the dependency detection will be done
symbol-based as introduced in dpkg-shlibdeps a while ago.

Cheers,
Sebastian

-- 
Sebastian "tokkee" Harl +++ GnuPG-ID: 0x8501C7FC +++ http://tokkee.org/

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary
Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.         -- Benjamin Franklin

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