On Sun, Oct 03, 2004 at 07:03:50PM +0200, Andreas Barth wrote: > * Adrian Bunk ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) [041003 17:10]: > > On Sun, Oct 03, 2004 at 12:44:21PM +0100, Martin Michlmayr wrote: > > > You certainly have a good point here. I'm not suggesting to remove > > > Recommends; I think the concept of Recommends is good. However, there > > > is also a difference between Depends and Recommends. I think what I'd > > > like to see is: > > > > > > Depends -> grave bug > > > Recommends -> normal (or important) bug > > > Suggests -> minor > > > > > > Recommends is stronger than Suggests but it doesn't completely break > > > the package so imho it shouldn't be RC. > > > It depends on how strong you expect a Recommends to be. My impression > > was, it's a "install the recommended package unless you really know what > > you are doing". > > > > And it's currently supported that in order to aid users a package > > management tool might handle recommends like dependencies. If this > > should continue to be supported, they have to be treated the same way. > > I agree here. However, if the RMs also agree. a (RC-)policy > clarification would be a nice thing to do.
The release policy states: "Packages in main cannot require any software outside of main for execution or compilation." A recommendation is not a requirement; I don't believe that unfulfillable Recommends are not release-critical. If we were to make this release-critical it should have been done months ago. We may revisit this post-sarge, depending on the number of packages affected. Clearly there's a difference between a package in main recommending a package in non-free (where the non-free package would be selected by default) and a package in main recommending a non-existing package (which tends to be treated as essentially a no-op by current generations of package management tools). Note that I'm not saying that unfulfillable Recommends aren't a bug. Cheers, -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
