Petter Reinholdtsen <[email protected]> writes: > We started by using depends. This proved a disaster, as the meta > packages would be close to impossible to keep in testing. It would be > thrown out or blocked from entering testing whenever any of the more > than 1000 packages we want had a RC problem. > > After struggling with this for a few years, we decided to use recommends > instead.
The problem here is IMO that the task still says "Depends", which is translated into "Recommends": this is just not intuitive. And it requires that a task that has a strong real "Depends" needs to do some workarounds. The number of blends is countable: I personally like the idea to first replace all "Depends" with "Recommends" in all tasks files, and then change the behaviour of the "blends-dev" package. We should also introduce a format identifier to make future changes easier; so my proposal would be: 1. We write a (maybe preliminary) format description and publish it under a well-defined URL 2. We create bugs for all known build-dependencies of blends-dev to 2.1 'sed s/^Depends:/Recommends:/ -i tasks/*` 2.2 insert a "Format: https://blends.d.o/format"; as first line to indicate that the new format is used 3. Once all switched (should be not that difficult, due to the straightforward change), we upload a new version of blends-dev that checks the format id and a) either exits with error if it is not there or a wrong one b) prints a depretation warning and proceeds with the old style in that case Because of the trivial change, I would prefer a). Best regards Ole
