Graham said: >> I wonder if the findutils maintainer should change this Suggests >> to Recommends, at least for Lenny.
Andreas replied: > I have considered it, but intentionally chosen against it. There has > been a *long* standing wish to make installation of locate optional, > bumping this to a recommends /imho/ stops us from fulfilling this > wishlist request. > > mlocate is now Priority: standard, so you should get it installed (or > offered for installation) automatically if you are not using bare > apt-get. [1] Hi Andreas, Aptitude has a preference setting which allows the user to decide whether "Recommended" packages should be installed automatically. The default is "Yes". When set to "No", aptitude does not automatically install recommended packages, but it does offer them during install/upgrade. In either case, aptitude still happily allows the manual removal of such packages. Also, there is an "Audit Recommendations" view which shows all packages which are currently recommended but not installed. Currently, with locate set to "Suggests", aptitude will neither select nor offer it while upgrading findutils. (One might reasonably argue that this is a deficiency in aptitude.) The "Priority" setting on mlocate doesn't seem to help either. So, based on my somewhat limited understanding of how aptitude works, I think that bumping it to Recommends will solve the upgrade problem for people who use aptitude, while still allowing the removal of the locate package if it is not wanted. Using bare apt-get to upgrade findutils from Etch to Lenny, I notice that apt-get does mention the suggested packages, but does not install them. IMHO that is not sufficient, because the suggested-packages message could be easily missed by the user, and they would still be "mysteriously" missing a locate utility. I honestly do not know what the effect of a bump to Recommends would be, in this case. I don't have dselect installed on my systems, and haven't used it in a long time, so don't know how it handles Recommends versus Suggests. -- graham -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
