On Sat, Apr 01, 2006 at 10:05:08AM +0200, Ren?? van Bevern wrote: > "Thaddeus H. Black" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > Hello Thaddeus, > > > Given wyrd, console-only users can install and use > > remind normally, can't they? Tk8.4 Depends on libx11-6, > > which console-only users normally lack. Refer to > > Policy 7.2. > > The reason why I moved tk8.4 and tcl8.4 to Recommends actually _is_ > because there are console replacements for "tkremind", it has been a > Dependency before. Because it is only a Recommends currently, you do > not have to install TCL/Tk, if you do not want to. There are also > other frontends for remind that would also have to be listed > alike. Ok, these are not in Debian (yet), but that may change at any > time. > > If the Recommends really annoys users, I might rather split the > package, considering the long dependency chain that only goes out from > one single tool in the package or move TCL/Tk to a Suggests: > line. What do you think?
I think that your reasoning is good, and I think that you know your own
package best, so I should not argue against you; but let me say the
following, then you can decide what to do. In ordinary English as you
know, "recommends" means "strongly suggests", but this is not what the
technical term "Recommends" means in Debian. If
Package: bar
Recommends: foo
then anyone *can* install bar (installing bar alone won't break
anything), but bar doesn't really do anything useful unless foo also is
installed. In other words, the Recommendation advises non-foo users to
ignore bar.
However, sometimes the relationship between two packages is so strong
that you should use Recommends, anyway. A typical example of this is
Package: bar-data
Recommends: bar
Maybe someone wants bar-data without bar, but this is unlikely.
If you are in doubt, I think that you should just close the bug and not
apply the patch, but just pocket it. You can always come back and apply
the patch later if you change your mind. The judgment is yours. The
only reason I filed the report is that using Recommends for "strongly
suggests" is a fairly common packaging error, when in fact what
Recommends really means is "weakly depends". But if you do not feel
comfortable with the patch, then it's not a good patch for your package.
If you have some time, Micah Anderson's bittornado (0.3.7-5)
debian/changelog entry is instructive to this end. Thanks for replying.
--
Thaddeus Black
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