Bug#566924: vlc-nox: Please lower Depends: libavc1394-0, libraw1394-11

Florian Schlichting Florian.Schlichting at gmx.de
Tue Feb 2 08:41:55 UTC 2010


Hi,

On Sun, Jan 31, 2010 at 09:45:35PM +0100, Christophe Mutricy wrote:
> Le Mon 25 Jan 10 à 22:39 +0100, Florian Schlichting a écrit :
> > is it really necessary that vlc-nox *Depends:* on libavc1394-0 and
> > libraw1394-11? My laptop doesn't even have a firewire port,
> 
> The slightly good news is that due to the modular nature of vlc if you
> remove libavc1394-0 and libraw1394-11 forcefully you won't break vlc
> 
> (you should keep libdvbpsi however . It's needed to play MPEG2 TS files)

Oh I thought that's exactly the situation where one could
differentiate dependencies, and have vlc-nox only Recommends:
libavc1394-0 and libraw1394-11 (because vlc can do without, and if
they're just recommendend I could uninstall them without fiddling with the
package management); whereas vlc would still Depends: libdvbpsi as MPEG2
TS can be considered a very basic feature everybody really needs.

Well, looking at Policy, I think vlc-nox should actually only recommend
libdvbpsi and no more than suggest libavc1394-0 and libraw1394-11!
Quoting from 7.2:

...
The Depends field should be used if the depended-on package is required
for the depending package to provide a significant amount of
functionality.
...
The Recommends field should list packages that would be found together
with this one in all but unusual installations.
...
Suggests: This is used to declare that one package may be more useful
with one or more others. Using this field tells the packaging system and
the user that the listed packages are related to this one and can
perhaps enhance its usefulness, but that installing this one without
them is perfectly reasonable.
..


Are you aware that vlc-nox doesn't use and Recommends: or Suggests: for
any of its dependencies at all? Well it's up to you as the maintainers,
and I can understand if you don't want to use Suggests: as it's not
installed by default and then people might complain "vlc can't ...", but
surely there's a case for Recommends:?

Florian





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