On Sat, 19 May 2007 13:17:45 +0200, Hendrik Sattler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
> Am Samstag 19 Mai 2007 07:14 schrieb Manoj Srivastava:
>> If you do not wish to educate yourself on the details, perhaps you
>> should be heeding the directions given to you by the maintainer?
> Perhaps. But first, but not all packages are actually strict about
> that
That would be a bug, then. If you can identify such packages,
could you please file bug reports?
> and I do not want to bloat my installation
Well, for non-buggy packages, what you have is an issue of
trusting the maintainers judgement. In that case, you also have to
trust that the maintainer comes up with a correct, and properly
formulated explanation in under one line; which correctly emphasizes
the importance of the dependency relationship.
Since you don't trust the maintainers judgement in the first
place, I think the lack of space is likely to lead to a situation that
you'll make an equal number of incrorrect decisions dues to lack of
information, incorrectly interpreted information, and other
misunderstanding.
Now, adding such information to the README might not suffer from
the space limitations, but the trust issues still remain.
> and second, if it is really that important (read: essential part of
> functionality) is would be a Depends.
As the policy states; it is a strong, but not absolute
dependency. The core functionality might work. But ease-of-use, and
the optional frills that might make it truly useful might not -- ot the
package may fail in some non-mainstream circumstances (which is the
case with ucf).
> Does it really happen that often that this Recommends is needed. Or is
> it just to be on the safe side?
Unless you are a $Deity, or have conducted an extensive
analysis, this is a matter of judgement. By putting things as
recommends, the maintainer is saying, yes, it is a good thing to
install these packages together.
If you think the maintainers judgement is off, and have some
proof, file a bug to reduce the depndency.
> Anyway, it was just an example out of many. For non-core packages,
> Recommends often add functionality that I'll never use but the package
> maintainer uses them daily. Why should I install it then?
You don't have to. But you are saying you do not trust the
maintainers judgement, so asking in 80 characters or so why things are
needed is not likely to help. You'll be petter off just running
aptitude --withouit-recommends, and adding things you feel, in your
judgement, are truly needed.
manoj
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