On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 5:16 PM, Zefram <[email protected]> wrote: > David Golden wrote: >>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) > > There's too little that we can meaningfully do with optional dependencies, > so introducing another flavour of them wouldn't help. The only > consistently meaningful way to handle recommendations of non-prerequisite > modules is to describe them, and the intended interaction, in the current > module's documentation. The META file is completely the wrong place > for this sort of information.
That's not necessarily true. It would be a relatively trivial change to have CPAN/PLUS attempt to install recommends (or suggests/prefers, whatever) -- with or without a prompt -- but not treat their unavailability or test failures as a failure for installing the main module. So this proposal is trying to distinguish (or at least better define) what kind of optional we mean so we know what CPAN/PLUS should do that they don't do today. -- David
