On 1/14/2014 6:41 PM, Fernando de Oliveira wrote: > The point (or the dumb question, forgive me for not knowing much about > this) is: although it is easy to see "whois" is linked to libidn, I > cannot notice any difference with or without. Would you an example, > please? With an example, I would come to first above: being useful, > should it not be recommended?
I am of the opinion that the recommended dependencies are being used too often in recent updates to the book. Recommended used to be something that was used to indicate that future builds against the package would fail if the "recommended" package was not installed. Now it seems that if a package can use a dependency and that dependency provides something useful it is recommended. Why? Can't it be like it used to and just annotate it in the optional dependencies? If it really provides something useful, simply add the parameter in the command explanations with the explanatory text saying that adding it will provide "xyz" support to the package. I appreciate the work that you do for the book, Fernando, but I think that you need to let users decide for themselves what they need in each package. The "Command Explanations" section is used to provide information for users to decide if they need to install a package and add the necessary parameters to the configure command. My point being, let the users decide what they want. Recommended dependencies should be something that (well, this was just discussed in a previous thread) avoids failure in the future. For example, years and years ago, Gimp-Print was added as a recommended dependency to the Gimp instructions because the editor felt that you needed to print some image. I objected then and still feel the same way. A simple entry into the "Command Explanations" lets users know that if they don't install an optional dependency, then functionality will be lost. Let them decide. I hope this makes sense. I feel the users should be the ones that make decisions for their systems. Not BLFS developers. Additionally, making the users decide what they need (functionality-wise) is much better than developers blindly "recommending" packages because they feel users "need" it. JMHO -- Randy -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
