Package: openoffice.org-mimelnk Version: 1.0.99+1.1rc3-1 Severity: normal [ I've already chatted with Rene on IRC about this, but I'm filing a report so that myself and koffice users can more easily track the issue. ]
Hi. Currently openoffice.org-mimelnk recommends openoffice.org. According to debian policy (7.2): The Recommends field should list packages that would be found together with this one in all but unusual installations. [Suggests] is used to declare that one package may be more useful with one or more other ... but that installing this one without them is perfectly reasonable. The mimelnk files basically inform KDE of which files are in fact OOo files so that it knows that they can be opened in OOo, KOffice or other OOo-aware apps. This is basically a convenience for users and does not require OOo in any way (e.g., if you are importing OOo docs into kword). Indeed it is quite common for users to have many more registered mimetypes than apps that can handle them. In this sense it seems that suggests, not recommends, is the correct form of dependency to use. The use of recommends does in fact have deeper ramifications for users of package management tools that enforce recommendations (which IMHO is not such a bad thing since - as policy says - users should have recommends installed in all but unusual situations). An example of such a tool is dselect (AIUI, dselect enforces recommends but not suggests). For these users, installing the very small mimelnk package will cause the installation of the very large OOo package. Furthermore, for koffice (which I maintain), I have koffice-data recommends openoffice.org-mimelnk since these mimelnk files help the various import/export filters run smoothly. In this case, installing any koffice application would have the effect of installing all of OOo as well. For this reason I would appreciate notification if you don't plan to change the dependency so that I can downgrade the koffice recommends to a suggests before sarge starts to freeze - there are many people using dselect, and an unintentional OOo installation is quite a hit on both disk space and bandwidth. Though for the reasons described earlier it does seem that changing OOo-mimelnk's recommends to a suggests is the correct solution. Thanks - Ben. :) -- System Information: Debian Release: testing/unstable Architecture: i386 Kernel: Linux skaro 2.4.22-1-686 #1 Fri Sep 5 23:04:29 EST 2003 i686 Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C -- no debconf information
