On 27 Jan 1999, Manoj Srivastava wrote: > I must confess that even I thought the the policy statement > meant that one should be able to install all optional packages > simultaneously.
I think this is exactly the idea Ian Jackson had in mind when he wrote those definitions, and I think we should not abandon it, since it enhances Debian friendliness greatly. > Though this is a laudable goal, and indeed, was once > achievable, but with all the packages that we have now (pushing on to > 3000), I don't know if we can actually make the promise stick. We will not probably be able to comply with that for slink at this point, but if it is a laudable goal, I think we should try for potato. For every pair of conflicting optional packages, everything we would have to do is: * To decide which of the two is better, cooler, or nicer, and mark the other as extra. * Or to repackage them so that they are compatible, like pgp-i and pgp-us (update-alternatives is our friend). It is true that we have many packages in this situation, but considering that we have a *huge* number of packages (more than 2200 in main), they are only a tiny fraction of them. -- "7f39c9191bcc5078833a8d045941da0b" (a truly random sig)
