Sorry for not getting back to you earlier on this. On Tuesday 23 December 2008, Santiago Vila wrote: > The only way to remove this dependency would be to add build-conflicts > for all the external libraries, but then it would be a matter of time > that someone submits a bug against gettext for using embedded > libraries, as the latest policy strongly discourages it. > > To summarize, I think gettext in its current form is the least of two > evils. > > May I close this bug?
Well, I agree that given the current upstream this is probably the best you can do. The main point of my BR was to maybe ask upstream if it isn't possible to use something a bit more lightweight than glibc to implement the --color option. It still seems to me that using a $huge lib for only a single minor feature, especially when other command-line tools implement a similar option much cheaper is not the best coding practice. I also agree that glibc is a fairly general-purpose library that will end up on most systems at some point. I was just surprised to see it get pulled in on my armel box because of gettext. It definitely is an upstream issue and not a packaging issue. If you prefer to close the BR, for example because you don't expect upstream to be responsive to this (after all, you know them better than I do), then feel free to do so. On Tuesday 23 December 2008, Santiago Vila wrote: > While we are at it, if you want your system to be small, why do you > let aptitude to install recommends by default to begin with? > > In my case, the thing that surprised me most while upgrading from etch > to lenny was apt's new handling of recommends. I actually mostly agree with the recommends change. In some cases it's annoying (devscripts is a major pain with its 1 million recommends I don't want; also some perl packages), but in general I like the "should normally be installed together with, but can be omitted if you know what you're doing" idea. I leave it on on purpose as IMO we need to reduce the nr. of useless recommends and the best way to do that is to file BRs when you spot them. As I almost always run aptitude interactively it's relatively simple to unselect unwanted recommends, and I also use 'aptitude -R' occasionally (especially when installing build dependencies). For small systems you often need to make manual choices anyway. For example, I mostly install debconf-english instead of debconf-i18n. Cheers, FJP -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
