Hi Per, On Fri, April 2, 2010 13:50, Per W. wrote: > Hi Thijs! > > Thijs Kinkhorst wrote: >> It's >> common practice to use Recommends in Debian for packages that only >> enable >> certain non-essential functionality in a package. This seems exactly >> such >> a case where the whole of signing-party works fine without the mentioned >> package but only one non-essential part does not. > > Yes, you are right. Recommends should add non-vital functionality. > Like a tray-icon for Pidgin, but Pidgin runs fine without it. > The problem is that springgraph crashes without this recommended package. > I think no program should crash on a valid Debian installation! > And a installation without recommends is valid!
I don't agree that it 'crashes'. It displays exactly what is going on: GD.pm is missing: [th...@morgana]~$ springgraph Can't locate GD.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /etc/perl /usr/local/lib/perl/5.10.1 /usr/local/share/perl/5.10.1 /usr/lib/perl5 /usr/share/perl5 /usr/lib/perl/5.10 /usr/share/perl/5.10 /usr/local/lib/site_perl .) at /usr/bin/springgraph line 187. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/bin/springgraph line 187. You may reason that an even better message would be "Could not find GD.pm; please install libgd-gd2-perl to get it.". That would probably be nice but I do think that given the package's target audience, and that you need to be a somewhat more advanced user anyway when not installing Recommends, the current message suffices. However, if a patch is submitted to change this message I'll probably apply it. >> Note that APT by default installs all Recommended packages, so the admin >> explicitly needs to remove that package to get into this situation. > > AFAIK this default has been changes lately and does not affect the > validity of a Debian installation. > Many admins use '''APT::Install-Recommends "0";''' because they do not > like this new behaviour. That is their own choice and they should be prepared to deal with the occasional consequence to have to install an extra package to make use of full functionality. cheers, Thijs -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
