Bug#577075: (re)move support for libmobiledevice into a different package

[Josselin Mouette]

Le vendredi 09 avril 2010 à 14:24 +0200, Christoph Anton Mitterer a
écrit :
> IIRC, just with installing g-d-e you already get bluetooth stuff, obex
> and webdav (indirectly via gnome-user-share).
> 
> Personally I think there should be more freedom, e.g. just recommending
> or suggesting such stuff.

This is the most frequent request about the GNOME metapackages. And I
will answer you to do that: 
> Of course it's possible to simply not install g-d-e but having a
> metapackage is quite handy.

Yes it is handy, and the reason why it works well is that it has
Depends. If we use Recommends instead, packages won’t be installed upon
upgrades. Furthermore metapackages would be allowed to migrate to
testing without having all packages ready, and this could completely
break some computers, again upon upgrade. Using Depends ensures that for
a large part of our users, the package selection remains conformant to
our recommendations over time, which means more standardization and less
bugs.

> > We have lots of vendor-specific backends in existing packages (ses e.g.
> > the kernel)
> k... but the kernel is really a special case ;)

Really? How is it different? Isn’t it about hardware support of hundreds
of specific pieces, each of which is only found on a minority of
computers?

I think the same of iStuff as you do, and I wouldn’t buy some. But I
think it’s important that those who bought iCrap can use it out of the
box, as long as there is no impact for others. And I don’t think a few
hundred kilobytes of hard disk space is a substantial impact.

> > and lots of vendor-specific packages which are installed by
> > default: xserver-xorg-video-radeon, hpijs-ppds…
> They're installed by default (at least if you install recommends by
> default) but you're not forced to do so... as it's not depends.

xserver-xorg depends on xserver-xorg-video-*, and it’s the way things
should be. If you want to make your own package selection for X.org, the
X maintainers are not responsible. The same goes for GNOME.

Cheers,
-- 
 .''`.      Josselin Mouette
: :' :
`. `'   “A handshake with whitnesses is the same
  `-     as a signed contact.”  -- Jörg Schilling