On Sat, Dec 22, 2012 at 02:57:56PM +0100, Joachim Breitner wrote: > Hi, > > Am Samstag, den 22.12.2012, 14:39 +0200 schrieb Andrei POPESCU: > > On Sb, 22 dec 12, 13:17:32, Joachim Breitner wrote: > > > Users tend to fall into one of three classes: > > > A. Users that, if they have foo-dev installed, always also want > > > foo-prof installed. > > > B. Users that want to manually decide for what packages they want > > > the -prof package and for what package not. > > > C. Users who don’t want any -prof package around. > > > > > > Currently, we only really help user B. If user A installs foo-dev there > > > is nothing that ensures that he gets foo-prof installed as well. > > > > And a foo-dev Recommends: foo-prof is not suitable because? > > because we cannot tell what the user will want. For example, a user of > xmonad will not want -prof packages installed, and an addition 400MB of > useless stuff on his computer is not in his, and hence our, interest. > > Also, a user from the class A wants a stronger guarantee than just > Recommends, which is just a suggestion to the package manager, but not a > a hard relation.
No, that's not true; a Recommends is not a Suggests. Yes, I'm aware you didn't mean to say that. However, the very definition of Recommends implies that it is stronger than a suggestion, yet less than a hard dependency. It seems perfectly suited for your purpose. It covers case A perfectly, and B too, with some effort (but then, users in class B need to excert some effort anyway; the difference is only that now they need to decide which packages not to install when installing a -dev package, rather than which packages to install in addition to their -dev packages). It doesn't cover class C, but then that can be covered quite easily by having all packages with profiling information have something like Provides: haskell-profiling With that, users in class C can use equivs to create a package which Conflicts: haskell-profiling And then they'll never get any -prof packages installed, without any need for these metapackages. -- Copyshops should do vouchers. So that next time some bureaucracy requires you to mail a form in triplicate, you can mail it just once, add a voucher, and save on postage. -- 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/20121223211504.ge18...@grep.be
