Re: ["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>] Re: apt-get
On Mon, May 15, 2000 at 06:55:56PM +0200, Paul Seelig wrote:
> > with many bogus dependencies (depends that should be
> > recommends, recommends that should be suggests---and doc packages
> > should _never_ suggest the main package;
>
> Yes, i found some of these as well. My favorite (not!) is the
> qt-devel package which always tries to force me to install the various
> MBs large qt-doc package as well. I once wrote a personal mail to the
> current maintainer (a year ago or so) but ist was ignored/overseen
> (suppoesedly without any bad intentions). Yes, i'll better send out
> an official bug report instead. Probably serves far better as a
> constant reminder ... ;-)
File a bug. It's very easy (at least for me it is :) and it would have
actually helped to fix your problem, because the maintainer changed in the
meantime and the new one would probably see the bug report and probably fix
it.
Anyway, current libqt2-dev has:
Suggests: qt2-doc (>= 1:2.0.2-1.1)
That's okay, I presume?
> In any case *no* package should *force* installation of it's related
> documentation if the admin has no use/interest/disk space for it.
Agreed.
> A recommendation or suggestion should *never* be turned into a dependency.
For example...?
> > There was a brief power out last night; when I came in today, all of
> > my workstations booted to fvwm2, when my preferred wm is windowmaker.
> > Somewhere over the last few updates fvwm2 silently (IMO offering to
> > change the configuration as the default option in the middle of
> > upgrading 150 packages is "silent") substituted itself as the
> > preferred wm.
>
> I've been bitten by this as well.
You probably upgraded one window manager but not the other, and xfree common
stuff, so then x-window-manager alternatives stuff was used instead of
/etc/X11/window-managers settings. It should all be fixed now, as all window
managers are using the alternatives system.
> > Obviously Debian philosophy has changed;
>
> It probably hasn't but maybe some maintainers lost some of their
> awareness of it...
Yeah, that might the case. That's why the bug tracking system exists.
Use it. :)
--
Digital Electronic Being Intended for Assassination and Nullification
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