On Thu, Dec 06, 2007 at 10:26:11AM -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote: > > I'm not sure if there's any point to continuing to try to make sure > > that nothing >= optional conflicts with anything else >= optional. > Hmm. Can you elaborate on this, please? Is it because it is too > hard to achieve this? Or you think this is something unattainable even > in theory? It is a nice invariant, if only we could get it to hold for > Debian.
I don't have any statistics to back the following up. I don't think we have been doing it very thoroughly for years now, so at best it's something that's often true, but not always (eg, there's only one mail-transport-agent of priority optional or higher -- except there's actually three: exim4-daemon-light (standard), exim4-daemon-heavy and nbsmtp). It requires us to choose a winner amongst similar packages that use Conflicts instead of alternatives, when really we'd rather leave that up to our users (or people maintaining derivative distros, or tasksel or whatever). I don't think it serves an actual point -- back in the day saying "install everything of priority optional or above" was a feasible way of getting a really powerful and useful Debian system. That's not really plausible anymore thanks to the sheer amount of software. > > optional -- all the good software in the world > > extra -- obscure stuff > If we are removing the invariant that everything in optional > should not conflict with anything else in optional, and extra is where > the conflicing packages go, is there any reason to retain extra as a > distinct section? Being able to classify software as "Unless you have a really special need, you don't want this" still seems somewhat useful to me. I also somewhat like the idea of having your average free software package in main at a higher priority than your average non-free software package. Cheers, aj
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