On Thu, Nov 07, 2024 at 12:08:22AM -0700, Soren Stoutner wrote:
> On Wednesday, November 6, 2024 10:41:46 PM MST Aaron Rainbolt wrote:
> > Again, this isn't a problem limited to a derivative distribution. I
> > respect that your opinion of how Recommends should work differs from
> > mine. That doesn't change the policy though, and it doesn't change that
> > neglecting or changing the policy's rules in this area will cause and
> > is causing problems to some of Debian's users. Ultimately I don't care
> > exactly how those problems are solved, I just want to solve them.
>
> Let me try to explain what I see as the core of the problem.
>
> First, some background on the three existing categories.
>
> 1. Depends: These are the packages necessary to install and run the basic
> functionality of
> the package.
>
> 2. Recommends: These are the packages required to enable all the features
> of the
> package.
>
> 3. Suggests: These are packages that enhance the functionality of the
> package.
So if we have consensus that these definitions of the categories is
correct, then there shouldn't be any contrversy of whether gwenview is
"wrong"in recommending kamera, which Aaron was objecting to. After
all, there is a button in gwenview that would activate kamera. If
kamera is not installed, then no matter how many time the user mashes
the "kamera" button, Nothing Will Happen. So clearly, thats a
"feature" of gwenview, and kamera should _absolutely_ be a Recommends.
No?
But let's take a step backwards about why there seems to be so much
passion about this question. Especially when I really don't care all
that much. Part of this is because as far as I'm concerned, my time
is valuble, and storage is _cheap_ so I always configure a huge amount
of storage on my desktops. For example, my root file system is 824
GiB --- and Kamera is 1 MiB. So as far as I'm concerned, the amount
of time that I've spent reading this e-mail thread is far more
expensive that the storage cost of Kamera. :-)
So why do we care? If someone is installing in a very
storage-constrained environment --- say, the are creating some
appliance image to be hosted on a VM, or Docker, or a Raspberry Pi ---
then just configure apt to ignore all of the recommends. Someone who
is trying to configure the appliance may need to do a bit more work to
figure out what package are *really* needed, but if they are really so
concerned about minimizing every single byte, then that's probably the
right answer.
And these days, with the size of most desktop systems, maybe we should
be optimizing for user convenience, and for that use case, just
installing all of the Recommends packages is again, probably the best
choice in terms of making life easy for users, at the minor cost of
paying a bit more for storage. (Reminder: 1TiB of SSD can be as cheap
as $50 USD --- and if you want to super-duper expensive, gold-plated
SSD you have to spend $100 USD. Horrors!)
So what we seem to be trying to optimize for is this middle ground
where storage is not super-duper constrained, where the user will want
to very carefully consider every single package to decide whether or
not each package should be installed --- and yet storage is *just*
cheap enough that you want to have "the right thing" to happen. The
only problem is that everybody's opinion is going to be different
about what "the right thing would actually be". And until we can have
some kind of AI were you can tell the system what exactly you plan to
use diffoscope for in human language, and have it automatically decide
what packages you need or not, I don't think this problem is really
soluble.
Fortunately, I also don't think it's all that important that we solve
it. Personally, I think the current set of knobs and defaults are the
right one.
Regards,
- Ted
