Daniel Burrows <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Thanks for these nice explanations. I'm not sure whether I can still help here. Just some thoughts.
> (2) Never try to resolve a recommendation by eliminating its source. > The problem here is that (for technical reasons) this would probably > also eliminate any question of holding back the source to resolve > a recommendation. Moreover, it's arguable that recommendations > should be obeyed to the point of removing packages where they're > unmet (since removing a recommendation often breaks the package > badly). Hm. Maybe this is also a problem with the definition of Recommends, or generally with applying dependency models to "compilation packages" as teTeX is one. tetex-extra declares Recommends: latex-beamer, because beamer is included in upstream teTeX and only excluded by us because it exists as a separate Debian package (which is often more up-to-date). I think this is a good reason for a Recommends. New users will get told: If you want to prepare presentations in LaTeX, just install teTeX, it includes beamer. However, not installing any of tetex-extra's Recommends does not break it at all. It's just missing some of the possible functionality, but the rest works fine. > This could be acheived without too much disruption by adding a new > flag on package versions that says "never install this to fulfill > a softdep", then setting this flag on all UNINST versions. I think > that would be satisfactory and put the "technical reasons" to rest. Would that mean that you get shown that tetex-extra recommends latex-beamer, but it wouldn't be automatically selected? Even when installing tetex-extra for the first time? Regards, Frank -- Dr. Frank Küster Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
