Comments regarding pd-arraysize_0.1-1_amd64.changes

[IOhannes m zmoelnig]

On 2010-11-07 19:57, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
>>
>> i would sugggest to use a "Suggests: pd-pddp" at the most.
> 
> 
> First off, its key to mention to those not familiar with Pd: the help
> patches are fully functional scripts, not just static documentation.  So

yes, thanks for making the clear to our list compañeras.

> that means if pddp/link is not available, then that aspect of the will
> not work (in this case pddp/link provides a clickable link to a webpage).

which pretty much explains why i think that this is not a core component
of the help-patch, and that one could well live without it.

a lot of documentation in debian comes as pdf [*].
this documentation is fully useless without a pdf-reader. still most
packages (even if it is a separate -doc package) don't "Depend" on
'pdf-viewer' (as a matter of fact, most of them don't even "recommend"
or "suggest" a 'pdf-viewer').

yes, i am aware of the fact, that the help-patches are not
/usr/share/doc/-documentation, whereas most *.pdf do reside in
/usr/share/doc and that there are slightly different conditions.
however, there are packages like 'evolution-common' that do install pdf
files into /usr/share/evolution/2.30/help/ without having a single
dependency on anything pdf-related (as a matter of fact, the only
dependency relation of the package is a "recommends" on 'evolution').

> 
> My question here is: why make things deliberately hostile for newbies? 
> The docs should work and not throw errors when the open them.  I can
> understand using Recommends if they are installed by default with no
> user intervention. I'd prefer Depends for the above reasons.  I strongly
> disagree about using Suggests here.
> 

my question is: why make things deliberately hostile for non-newbies.

the big majorities of users who use [arraysize] will never look at the
help-patch, and even if they do they will either have "pd-pddp"
installed (because they followed the recommends/suggests), or they will
get a perfectly valid and informative help-patch with a single link not
working and they will be greeted by an error at the pd-console (because
they have chosen to live without httplinks).

please don't treat (newbie) users as if they very totally out of brains.

debian provides a way to specify hard/soft dependencies and imho they
should be used when they make sense. if you think having 3-class
dependencies is arguable, we should prabably argue this on a larger
scale e.g. on debian-devel@


anyhow, i don't insist on "Suggests", "Recommends" is fine with me.

fgamsdr
IOhannes

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