Getting rid of circular dependencies, stage 5

[Thaddeus H. Black]

The following has appeared on debian-devel, but might (or might not) be
thought more interesting here.  I would add to the post my remark that
the existing "Recommends:" control field does already provide more or
less the metadata the poster suggests, but his point is interesting
nevertheless.

----- Forwarded message from Dominique Dumont <domi at komarr.grenoble.hp.com> -----

From: Dominique Dumont <domi at komarr.grenoble.hp.com>
To: debian-devel at lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: Getting rid of circular dependencies, stage 5
Resent-Date: Tue, 25 Jul 2006 04:18:44 -0500 (CDT)

Joey Hess <joeyh at debian.org> writes:

> Steve Greenland wrote:
>> Sure, it allows some one to install foo-data without the program that
>> uses it? So what? It's unlikely to happen by accident, and annoying to
>> those doing it intentionally. (Just like those foo-docs that depend on
>> foo, although they are mostly fixed, now.)
>
> I don't buy the often-made argument that foo-data packages are
> generally useful to install just to look at the beautiful data.

As a casual user, if I want the "foo" functionality, I'll probably
want to install foo and not even look at foo-data.

Another point of view of this problem can be expressed this way:
- foo without foo-data is *broken* hence the need for a dependency.
- foo-data without foo is not broken (because there's not program to
  invoke), but is *useless*.

May be a better solution would be to flag foo-data as "useless alone".

(I would love to be able to hide from aptitude all these "useless
alone" packages so I could sift faster in the package list).

HTH

-- 
Dominique Dumont 
"Delivering successful solutions requires giving people what they
need, not what they want." Kurt Bittner

----- End forwarded message -----
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