I'll think about this, but ispell requires a wordlist in order for its "look" command to work. It's not a strict requirement for the rest of ispell's functionality, which is why the wordlist packages are recommends and not depends.
The policy manual still says that we should recommend "packages that would be found together with this one in all but unusual installations." I think a system that tries to minimze disk space requirements qualifies as an unusual installation, especially these days, but I guess you could convince me that I'm wrong. I don't really understand why apt decided to automatically install recommended packages by default, because I haven't had time to study the issue, so I'm not going to beat that dead horse here. Would it hurt or help debian-edu (and other distributions that try to minimize disk space requirements) if it were to configre apt to not install recommends by default? Lots of people do that these days, and every package should still be able to work reasonably well without its recommended packages (I believe). Let me know what you think. Thanks. On Dec 16, 2007 9:02 AM, Petter Reinholdtsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Package: iamerican > Version: 3.1.20.0-4.3 > Severity: wishlist > Tags: patch > User: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Usertag: debian-edu > > Hi. While working on the Lenny version of Debian Edu, I noticed that > iamerican recommend wamerican (and ibritish is similar). The new apt > in Lenny will install recommends by default, and because of this, I > will ask if you can consider reducing this relationship to suggests. > > In Debian Edu, we want to install the spell checkers for the programs > using them, but want to save some space and not install the word lists > (no program we include are using them). This become a bit hard when > the recommended packages are installed. > > To defend the 'patch' tag, here is the recipe to change it. Replace > > Recommends: wamerican > and > Recommends: wbritish > > with > Suggests: wamerican > and > Suggests: wbritish > > Happy hacking, > -- > Petter Reinholdtsen > > > -- David Coe +1 410 505 4468 home/office/cell, depending on where I am -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
