Bug#499583: [gcalctool] Fails to bring up Help Contents (not using GNOME)

[Filipus Klutiero]

Le November 14, 2008 09:04:13 pm Josselin Mouette, vous avez écrit :
> If you don’t install recommends, you will miss some functionality. Full
> stop. We are not going to patch every single package out there to add
> warnings like “You need to install this package” every time you hit a
> functionality that is missing.
>
> In short: install Recommends, unless you know what you do. If you don’t,
> don’t complain.

People don't have to install recommendations "unless they know what they do". 
This is what a dependency is for. Just like you can choose to install a 
suggestion, you can choose to not install a recommendation. People reporting 
a bug which only happens when a recommendation is not installed are not 
complaining, they're legitimately exposing a problem in the packaging.

It seems that upstream gcalctool expects to have yelp available. Therefore, if 
you choose to package gcalctool without having it depend on yelp, 
you "should" be ready to adapt gcalctool to behave correctly when yelp is not 
installed.

If you don't, there is a bug. In this case, this is however a minor bug, so if 
you're not willing to fix it, it would be reasonable to reopen the report, 
downgrade it to minor and tag it wontfix.