Jens Peter Secher <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Adam Borowski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >> On Sun, Jul 16, 2006 at 10:11:41AM +0200, Thijs Kinkhorst wrote: >>> >>> I agree that that is a common type of file to recover, so that would >>> make it more appropriate to Recommend cpio rather than Suggest. >> >> "a common type"? Come on, that's not just "common", it's "a vast >> majority of cases". And, a hard Depend on a small priority=important >> package is not a big burden -- what about just having a dependency >> without the comment? > > No. > > And the reason can be found in Policy section 7.2: > [...] > The Depends field should be used if the depended-on package is > required for the depending package to provide a significant > amount of functionality. > > The Depends field should also be used if the postinst, prerm or > postrm scripts require the package to be present in order to > run. Note, however, that the postrm cannot rely on any > non-essential packages to be present during the purge phase. [...] > > The dependency system is used to make sure things don't break on the > _system_ level.
I don't agree. This "break on the system level" only relates to the second paragraph I quoted. The first one is also a reason for a Depends. If this other package is needed for the core functionality, than it should be depended on. > To ease upgrades, transitions, etc., dependencies > (Depends) should be kept to the absolute minimum. There's always a tradeoff: The easiest system to upgrade is one that runs, but is barely usable for anything... Regards, Frank -- Frank Küster Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
