[Bill Allombert] > The `Depends' field should be used if the depended-on package is > required for the depending package to provide a significant > amount of functionality.
I'd say if a -data package is useless without its corresponding binary package, that fits this definition just fine. Policy does not specify *why* a package might fail to provide significant functionality without the presence of something else. (Unless you wish to argue that -data packages provide no functionality, which seems a pretty arbitrary definition of 'functionality'.) However, that's rather beside the point. I'd be happy to concede that Depends should have a narrower definition, if a 'Useless-Alone' or 'Keep-Orphan' field/tag could be introduced to cover the -data case. Hmmm, what's the story with fields versus tags for boolean properties? "Essential" is a field, but people are now talking about tags for this sort of thing instead. > If you want to remove useless package, use aptitude debfoster or > deborphan. dpkg will _never_ do it for you. apt-get will try to do it > but at the expense of considerable breakage risk. Bug #310490 show an > example where the risk is to remove every KDE packages. I read that wrong at first and thought that KDE was what you meant by "useless packages". (:
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