Ole Streicher wrote: > Josh Triplett <j...@joshtriplett.org> writes: > > The whole point of my metapackages is that absolutely everything > > *except* those metapackages is marked as "automatically installed". > > There's no programmatic way to distinguish between "Recommends that > > should be installed" and "Recommends that should not be installed"; that > > would be per-machine state information, which is exactly what I'm trying > > to avoid. > > What is "recommends that should not be installed"? It sounds a bit > contradicting to me. Why don't you use "Suggests" for that?
I'm not talking about the dependencies of my metapackages; I only use Depends and Conflicts in those. I'm talking about the Recommends of packages in Debian. And there are quite a few of those that I do indeed think ought to use Suggests. > > So I turn off Recommends and make sure Depends reflect the packages I > > want installed. > > I think this is abusing the dependencies. The Policy has the hint that > Recommends: is for everything that is usually installed except in > special situations. Why would one turn them off by default??? > (... except for special situations) That's what Policy says, yes. That doesn't mean all Recommends are sensible, and in practice, it's more common that I *don't* want them than that I do. > > I suppose in theory I could turn Recommends back on and then add > > Conflicts in my metapackages for the Recommends that shouldn't be > > installed, but a quick check on my current system shows hundreds of > > uninstalled packages on my system that are Recommends of installed > > packages. That's more packages than I currently have in the Depends of > > my metapackages; maintaining that doesn't seem practical. > > At least, I don't get this. Can you make an example here? Sure. Here are a few packages that are Recommends of packages I do depend on, but that I don't want installed: - default-mta - ppp - valgrind-dbg (323MB of debug symbols) - xpdf - libltdl-dev (anything that needs this should have a Depends on it) - locales (not since libc-bin started shipping C.UTF-8) - mailx (as provided by bsd-mailx and similar) - Piles and piles of extra Perl modules - busybox-static Of those, only locales seems at all justifiable as something that should almost always be co-installed. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20150730214842.GA20216@x
