On Thu, 2003-11-20 at 09:16, Junichi Uekawa wrote: > > > The configure script is checking for 'python' script. > > > > > > What was the original reason for the 'recommends' instead of > > > 'depends'? It's not really clear to me. > > > > some people wanted to be able to keep the default python version at > > version 2.2, but install packages from unstable, when the default > > versions were different in testing and unstable. > > I do doubt such special needs should be forced upon all of > us.
The original reason was the policy in general was designed around using "python" refer to the default version of python without having any hard dependencies on exactly what version it was, and pythonX.Y for referring to to a particular version of python without having any dependencies on what the current default version is. The reason for this philosophy was you start getting all sorts of weird side affects once you start violating this clean separation. The above complication is just one manifestation. The big one for me is it complicates transitioning between versions... this dependency blocked any simple packages that only depended on python2.3 from transitioning into testing, because python2.3 couldn't get into testing until python (2.3) did, which couldn't happen until _every_ package had transitioned to python (2.3). Without this dependency, all the python2.3 packages could have transitioned to testing _before_ migrating the default python to python (2.3), giving us a more incremental and less traumatic transition. Unfortunately, the policy fails to take into account all the source-package and build-depends issues. This means the clean separation of python and pythonX.Y is not actually that clean... some more work is needed on the policy to resolve these issues. -- Donovan Baarda <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://minkirri.apana.org.au/~abo/