Ian Jackson <ijack...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:
> Russ Allbery writes ("Re: no{thing} build profiles"):>> Minimal installation size is *not* the only goal here. Ease of use and >> lack of surprise is important to. Personally, I'd much rather have >> numerous unused packages installed than to have something break in an >> opaque way when I try to use it, even if I'm unlikely to need to use >> it. > I would note that none of this is an argument against demoting this > dependency to a Recommends. It is *an* argument, but definitely not as strong of an argument. I'm pretty strongly opposed to Suggests here. I think that's simply wrong. Recommends is a trickier question, and I can see the case for asking shared libraries to use Recommends instead of Depends for cases like this, even if it makes the library essentially non-functional. I'm not sure I'm convinced, but there's definitely a strong case, particularly in cases like gnupg where the package is of non-trivial size. The primary thing that gives me pause is the error handling. It needs to be *really obvious* to the user what to do to make the optional functionality work if the required package was removed for some reason (and remember that can be for reasons other than disabling Recommends, which I agree is an advanced configuration; Recommends aren't enforced across all conflicting package scenarios), and I'm concerned that shared libraries throwing some API error is not going to bubble up to the user in any useful way. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
