Hi Michael, On Wednesday 24 October 2007, Michael Biebl wrote: > Its hard to estimate such numbers. But given, that today more than 50% > of PCs are laptops, and with dell having a market share around 20%, this > would make 10% of users with a dell laptop.
That still leaves 90% of systems where the package is installed for no good reason (and 100% of desktops). And I would be very surprised if _all_ Dell laptops actually need this. I agree that Dell laptops are not uncommon, but I still feel strongly that this is insufficient justification to bloat every other system. On Wednesday 24 October 2007, Michael Biebl wrote: > We were discussing this issue among the hal maintainers before the > upload. Fact is, that the Suggests mechanism isn't really nicely > integrated into the apt frontend, so basically noone (at least not > novices) make use of that. They mostly only notice, when things don't > work as expected. libsmbios-bin is a rather small package which has > reasonable dependencies (libstdc++, libxml2), so our reasoning was, that > in a matter of "just works", it would make sense to make it a > recommends. All that is still no reason to ignore the definition of recommends: This declares a strong, but not absolute, dependency. The Recommends field should list packages that would be found together with this one in **all but unusual** installations. IMO this is just not true in this case. > Advanced users can easily chose to not install libsmbios-bin. The only problem is that they won't know _why_ libsmbios-bin is being pulled in, except by digging through the changelog. > Ideally, we should have some kind of support for "hardware based > dependencies/recommendations". Unfortunately right now we don't have > something like that. Petter Reinholdson is working on that. See the _new_ functionality of discover. This kind of thing fits _exactly_ in what discover is supposed to do now. Cheers, FJP
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