On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 04:37:57PM -0400, Eric Renfro wrote: > I'm seriously.. VERY seriously enraged by the very thought of Debian > moving to preconfigure and install "Recommends" by default. This is > the worst decision Debian could ever make. That very one thing is > one of my biggest complaints about Ubuntu doing so and strongly > /VERY/ strongly insist it not be done.
Actually, the fact that Debian has not done so for a long time in the past was one of apt's most-reported bugs, and rightly so. As a result of that, many packages listed in Recommends: are now more of a "strong suggests" rather than a "weak depends", as recommends are supposed to be; and as such, the current default behaviour is indeed not exactly perfect. However, given time, this will fix itself. > I have been a Debian user since way back when, and I completely > disagree with this decision. Recommends should NOT be treated as if > Required, ever. They are not. [...] > I will firmly say this. It is completely stupid to, by default, > install Recommends. In the past, only Ubuntu has ever done this, and > it is by far, one of the stupidest things they have ever done. > Absolutely /no/ other reasonable distribution does this. That is because no other "reasonable" distribution has a concept even remotely similar to Recommends, since rpm does not know "suggests" or "recommends", only "depends". Don't lose your sleep over it. -- The biometric identification system at the gates of the CIA headquarters works because there's a guard with a large gun making sure no one is trying to fool the system. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/01/biometrics.html -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
