On Wednesday, November 6, 2024 3:06:59 PM MST Aaron Rainbolt wrote: > And this brings us back to the original idea of creating a Weak-Depends > field. From my viewpoint, policy states that Recommends is for > declaring a strong (heavy emphasis on "strong" here), but not absolute, > dependency.
After reading over the policy on the subject, I do agree that the current policy is a little vague as to what is intended. "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.” https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html#binary-dependencies-depends-recommends-suggests-enhances-pre-depends What constitutes a strong dependency, or what constitutes packages being found together in all but unusual installations can be interpreted differently by different people. I would be in favor of rewording the policy to be more expressly inline with how Recommends is currently interpreted and used by the majority of maintainers and users, which is that all packages that are required for expected functionality should be included in Recommends, even if a feature is only used by a subset of users. Suggests should be for packages that enhance some aspect of the program, but which most users would either not expect to be installed automatically or are so large that a user should make an explicit decision to install them. There probably are some packages that have items in Recommends that should actually be in Suggests. I once received a bug report from a user asking me to move a package from Recommends to Suggests, which suggestion I agreed with and was grateful for receiving. But personally, I would find an additional category unnecessary and even confusing, especially because users already have the option to not auto-install recommended packages if they really don’t want them (which usually comes down to space-saving concerns, especially on embedded systems). -- Soren Stoutner so...@debian.org
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
