On Fri, Oct 01, 2004 at 10:39:31AM +0100, Martin Michlmayr wrote: >... > [*] However, I think Policy should be changed to requre Depends only > and not Recommends. In the past, dselect would scream loudly about > Recommends not being fulfilled but these days the tools don't really > care as much anymore.
This would imply the former Recommends handling in dselect was only a bug. I'd disagree with this: Recommends/Suggests on another package have roughly the following semantics: - "Suggests" means it might be nice to additionally install the package - "Recommends" means you should install the package unless you really know what you are doing Looking through the Debian archive, there seems to be the need for these two different semantics. The old dselect handling might have sometimes been annoying, but it helped users to be on the sfe side regarding dependencies. If you change policy to make Recommends similar to Suggests, you might even remove Recommends from policy since there will no longer be a real difference between Recommends and Suggests. > Martin Michlmayr cu Adrian -- "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days. "Only a promise," Lao Er said. Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed