I recently found some packages in at an IMHO totally wrong priority in Debian. Before taking action, I'd like to arrive at a rough consensus here. I also found some less clear-cut cases, so this prompted me to think a bit about the language in the policy and what it means. The more I think about it, the more I think it can be interpreted in wildly different manners, and I don't know which interpretation is the one to use.
(This mail contains large excerpts from pre-sarge discussion with ftp-masters. Full disclosure: This all started when I tried to decide the priority of a package of mine (scsh), I decided by example (these other packages are in optional -> surely scsh must, too), but ftp-masters decided by language of policy. ) So, policy says: optional This is all the software that you might reasonably want to install Does this mean to be in optional, the package - taken in isolation - must be one one might reasonably want to install or the set of packages in optional is a set one might reasonably want to install. policy says: if you didn't know what it was and don't have specialized requirements. What is "specialised requirements"? Are the requirements that come from a physical ailment (such as blindness) "special requirements"? Is the need to do accounting a "specialised requirement"? Is the need to use mathematical or scientific notations in a document a "special requirement"? Is the need to write in Ingala, Swahili, Norsk, English, Japanese, German a "special requirement"?x How do we decide what is a "special requirement" and what isn't? To take more concrete examples: - I found aleph, intercal (!) and whitespace (!!) in optional. Do these belong there? - What is "specialized requirements"? gnopernicus is in optional. From its description, it is useful only to blind (or not quite blind, but vision-challenged) people. If that's not a "specialized requirement", then I don't know what is. Is gnopernicus in optional a bug? openoffice.org is in optional, and what is it good for? Only to people wanting a WYSIWG MS Word-compatible word processor, a spreadsheet or something like that. Seen from where I stand, this is definitely a specialized requirement; hardly anybody in my friends circle has this requirement. OTOH, latex (package tetex-base) is also in optional. While everyone around me uses it for what it is, a generic document preparation system, I have repeatedly seen it referred to as useful only for people needing to put a lot of mathematics / chemistry / ... in their documents. If these people are right, then I guess that this counts as "specialized requirement", doesn't it? (Besides the fact that "a full TeX system" is explicitly included by policy.) Other examples include gclinfo, docbook-dssl, g77 (who needs a fortran compiler?), dpkg-dev (building debian package, specialised requirement, no?), kaffe (java -> specialised requirement), 6tunnel, bittorrent, screen, ipv6calc, iperf, ntfsprogs, malsync, jpilot (only owners of Palm PDAs -> specialized), ingerman (only for people speaking german -> specialized), amanda-*, arj, ttf-malayalam-fonts, ... I guess that this all boils down to: Specialized requirements can only be defined relative to a set of user profiles; what is not in one of these user profiles is "specialized". What are these user profiles for Debian? (The set of user profiles does not have to be an enumeration, it can be something like "any profile covering at least 1% of the computer users" or "all profiles covering at least 1% of the computer users or whose exclusion may make us bad press or get us sued".) - What is "might reasonably want to install"? You mean I "might reasonably want to install" all of firefox, mozilla, galeon, epiphany, konqueror, w3m, lynx, links, elinks, amaya and chimera2? Or, in another category, sawfish, icewm, wmaker, gwm, ion, xfce, amiwm, 9wm, aewm, amaterus, asclassic, blackbox, enlightenment, evilwm, fluxbox, fvwm, ion2, lwm, olwm, openbox, pwm, larswm, oroborus, sapphire, uwm, vtwm, w9wm, waimea, wm2, afterstep, flwm, golem, phluid? Say I don't know what ratpoison is. I "might reasonably want to install it", you think? -- Lionel -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]