On Oct 9, 2009, at 6:46 AM, David Golden wrote:
09. Clarify intent of 'recommends' and add 'suggests'
Proposal:
The 'recommends' flag is not equivalent to Debian recommends. The
intent
should be made clear for authors and the toolchain. If the Debian
definitions are adopted to better match usage by packagers, a
'suggests'
field should be added as well. (Adam Kennedy)
* C.f.
[http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html#s-
binarydeps
Debian definitions]
The debian descriptions seem reasonable.
Comments:
* The current recommends field is ignored, which makes it actually
work
like "suggests".
* If we redefine the actual meaning to match Debian, recommends
changes to
mean "install unless you say otherwise". This would result in a
massive
install dependency explosion in most cases. (AdamKennedy)
Both are really author recommendations. Neither list is required, so I
think the
tool chain should default to not installing either. But the tool chain
could support
a configure option for each so uses could decide to install recommends
as if they were
a regular dependency.
one option could be though that the failure for a recommended
dependency to install
could still allow the dependent to install
Graham.
