Hi Sven, On Mon, Apr 07, 2008 at 10:08:02AM +0200, Sven Joachim wrote: > This is a change for the worse, IMHO. Judging by the posts I've read in
I disagree. > the past on debian-user, at least 95% of the users did _not_ install > recommended packages by default, because that would pull in a lot of > arbitrary stuff they did not want. I've been in the 5% minority, been I don't see where this is relevant to the change we did. devscripts is not a package for everyone to use. Its targetted at developers and therefore has a quiet dedicated target group (which does not mean that other people might not use it, its just not made to suit their needs). Besides that I think who ever is able to change away from the _default_ settings is able to work around problems derived from this. > recommendations by default the situation had improved. And now you come > and want to install lots of (for me) useless cruft, even stuff that's > only useful for servers (why do you want ssh, wouldn't openssh-client > suffice?). The reason for this is, that some of the "useless cruft", as you call it, is used by very important scripts in the devscripts collection. To stay policy-compliant we need to make it either a (hard) depend or a recommends and we decided to go with the most sensible choice. About the server recommendation: Thats a bug. Its already fixed in the current trunk of devscripts. > You only achieve _one_ thing by this change: everybody¹ turns off the > automatic installation of recommended packages, like they did before, > and complains that installing recommendations by default is broken > because it brings in arbitrary stuff nobody wants. Well, thats a decision the people take on their own. They _are_ able to remove the packages they don't want instead of disabling a feature which is quiet useful. If they don't want to do that, they need to live with the consequences. Just my 2 cents as one of the devscripts maintainers Best Regards, Patrick
