Thibaut Paumard <mlotpot.n...@free.fr> writes: > Le 12/07/12 11:06, Gergely Nagy a écrit : >> Lets consider another case! Suppose I have Install-Recommends turned on, >> and install a theoretical meta package, that has half of its stuff in >> recommends, because they're not strictly necessary, but merely enhance >> the system. Lets suppose one of these enhancements include a tool I use >> every once in a while, but not daily. > > A later upgrade to your beloved meta-package could very well drop this > dependency.
While that may happen, that is far more unlikely than the case I outlined, and a case I can live with. > If that's a tool that you know you want, I strongly suggest > you mark it as manually installed. Problem is, at the time I installed the meta, I did not know about this particular tool. It came with the platform, and I really do not want to care which part of the platform it is. It came with it, I expect it will stay as long as it is part of the platform. Recommends breaks that assumption. >> As for why I wouldn't notice? Because I trust the system to do the right >> thing, and I do automatic, unattended upgrades. Not an uncommon thing to >> do, I believe. > > You should always check what your package manager wants to remove. Why? In my setup, it will never remove things that are not marked auto-install. I ensure that my system works, by having all dependencies satisfied. (And any recommends or suggests I do need, I install by hand) I do unattended upgrades for a reason: I don't want to spend time on double-guessing something that should work automatically. > In my experience, more often than not, aptitude tries to remove the > full gnome metapackage because of a temporarily unavailable depends. Well, mine won't do that, as I don't have gnome marked auto-install, so it will abort the upgrade instead. However, if things would move down to Recommends, it would happily proceed to remove things I do use, just because I didn't install it by hand... And here we get back to the same issue others had: manual bookkeeping. But this time, with recommends. So pray tell me, how is Recommends any better, when I have to resort to manual bookkeeping anyway? -- |8] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87ehohthas.fsf@algernon.balabit
