On الجمعـة 6 كانون الثاني 2017 12:34, Sandro Tosi wrote:
On Wed, Dec 28, 2016 at 10:28 PM, Afif Elghraoui <a...@debian.org> wrote:
There are many valid use cases of networkx on headless systems or where
visualization is done by other, separate programs, possibly written in
different languages where these currently recommended packages are not needed.
i consider the ability to generate graphical visualization of a graph
an important feature (not a core one), that's why those packages (all
required for visualization) are in Recommends. If you dont like them,
you can apt remove them or dont install recommends at all,but you are
not providing strong indication we should change this behavior
I think it's enough to reiterate the policy for Recommends, especially
the part that says "This declares a strong, but not absolute,
*dependency*", which is the reason why apt installs them by default. The
things you have in Recommends now are not any kind of dependency at all.
People who like to always get useful extras can install suggests.
To give an example of an appropriate Recommends situation, I have a
package, pbhoney that uses pbdagcon, but has a fallback implementation
in case pbdagcon is not available. I therefore put pbdagcon as a
Recommends. pbhoney's fallback implementation should only be used if
pbdagcon isn't available, like on some architectures. If people have to
keep disabling Recommends to avoid installing things that should be
Suggests, they will have a somewhat crippled installation here.
(which
has been there since ~10 years).
I don't think this makes it more correct. The misuse of Recommends has
been discussed before. See
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2016/04/msg00159.html and the rest
of the thread.
I hope what I've said now convinces you. Thanks for working on these
packages in any case.
regards
Afif
--
Afif Elghraoui | عفيف الغراوي
http://afif.ghraoui.name
