Le lundi 29 août 2011 à 16:40 +0100, Wolodja Wentland a écrit : > is there a specific reason why metapackages depend rather then recommend > packages they are meant to pull in?
There are several reasons for that - at least for the GNOME ones. The first one is to guarantee that newly added packages are correctly installed. APT does a lot better than it used to on this matter, but there are still cases where it won’t install them. Then, there is the problem that versioned Recommends are useless, while we often want to guarantee that an optimal version combination is installed. Worse: they are ignored. To work around that we could use “Recommends: blah” and “Breaks: blah << 3.0” but then the APT mechanisms will choose to remove blah instead of keeping the metapackage at a lower version. Finally, there’s the problem of keeping testing usable. You don’t want a metapackage to migrate until all the packages it brings have also migrated, otherwise testing systems could become unexpectedly unusable. I think we could solve a lot of those problems by treating metapackages specially in APT. For example, solutions removing such packages from the system should be given a lower priority. -- .''`. Josselin Mouette : :' : `. `' `- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/1314863528.3246.583.camel@pi0307572