hey, i dropped most adresses in Cc: header as this discussion becomes more and more offtopic.
On 30/09/2009 Sheridan Hutchinson wrote: > 2009/9/30 maximilian attems <[email protected]>: > > your box is simply broken if it does not foollow the debian reference, > > which explicitly says that recommends have to be installed. > > and yes you have negletected the big warnings. > > tweaking Debian boxes is fine as long as you understand what you change > > and can handle the consequences. > > Thank you for your perspective. It's interesting when install > recommends became default from what I read at the time it seemed > perfectly acceptable to continue running without recommends, and I > understand that many people do. Over time it appears that has become > less so the case, but I have never seen a big warning and cannot find > in the Debian documents where it says that package functionality > cannot be guaranteed without 'recommends' being enabled. > > I am very keen to keep my machines as close to stock and reference as > possible so I'm going to considering changing apt back to the default > install recommends this weekend. My boxes are highly untuned/tweaked > and where possible I run with default configuration files and let the > packages themselves look after everything. If I do configure anything > my preference is always to use --reconfigure or the package/app using > it's own interface. To think I'm meddling with my boxes intricacy's > just isn't the case. > > Overall though, as far as machines that follow the reference Debian > install are concerned, I cannot see the distinction now between a hard > dependency, and a recommends dependency. Maybe in future there will > just be 'dependencies' and 'suggests'; the recommends category is > superfluous for a Debian reference install. if you take a look at the debian policy, difference between depends and recommends should become obvious to you: ---snip--- Depends This declares an absolute dependency. A package will not be configured unless all of the packages listed in its Depends field have been correctly configured. The Depends field should be used if the depended-on package is required for the depending package to provide a significant amount of functionality. The Depends field should also be used if the postinst, prerm or postrm scripts require the package to be present in order to run. Note, however, that the postrm cannot rely on any non-essential packages to be present during the purge phase. Recommends This declares a strong, but not absolute, dependency. The Recommends field should list packages that would be found together with this one in all but unusual installations. ---snap--- http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html#s-binarydeps greetings, jonas
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