Y Giridhar Appaji Nag wrote: > Hi debian-devel, > > From policy 7.2 Binary Dependencies - Depends, Recommends, Suggests, Enhances, > Pre-Depends > > 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. > > Suggests > > This is used to declare that one package may be more useful with one or > more others. Using this field tells the packaging system and the user that > the listed packages are related to this one and can perhaps enhance its > usefulness, but that installing this one without them is perfectly > reasonable. > > I filed a lintian wishlist bug (#527363) requesting a I/W tag when non > documentation packages recommend documentation packages. > > With Install-Recommends being the default, many packages pull in a lot of > associated documentation. These documentation packages are sometimes large > and could be suggested rather than recommended. I noticed different opinions > about such bugs on the BTS (See #504042 that went on to be fixed and #526153 > that was not). I understand that upstream would sometimes like documentation > to be installed alongside the binaries, but popcon numbers of -doc packages > are quite lower the numbers corresponding to the packages that recommend them. > > Would there be any objections to filing minor/wishlist bugs against these > packages? I am including a tentative dd-list corresponding to the packages > [1] that I found after manually removing some packages [2]. I will modify it > based on suggestions. > > [1] grep-dctrl --pattern="-doc" --field=Recommends --and --not \ > --pattern="-dev" --field=Package --show-field=Package > [2] Mostly haskell, tcl/tk, texlive and gtk/gnome documentation packages a few > others like emacs-goodies-el, twisted-doc etc. >
<snip> > I wonder if I should remove the following packages from the list. > Debian X Strike Force <debia...@lists.debian.org> > xorg I've now begun taking care of this. xorg currently recommends xorg-docs, which contains several manpages that we consider standard for any X installation. Unfortunately, it also contains several other docs that aren't as necessary. What I've just done is uploaded a new version of xorg-docs to unstable that splits off a new xorg-docs-core package that contains these manpages. The xorg package in our git repository now depends on this -core package, and moves xorg-docs to suggests where it's more appropriate. Once we upload a new version of xorg, it'll still appear on your scan, but at that point we'll be considering it a false positive. Thanks for bringing this to my attention. - David Nusinow -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
