Agenda for the 2009-05-26 Packaging Committee meeting

[Iain Arnell]

On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 7:10 AM, Tim Lauridsen
<tim.lauridsen at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> soft-deps (Suggests/Recommends) is really hard to handle at the depsolver
> level. A depsolver need to now the hard ones, not stuff like 'it would look
> very nice to have pink bracelet to my little pony'. It is hard to make good
> decisions based on that, a asking the user every time is not a good solution
> IMO. You will need to take a popquiz every time you what to install a
> package.
> I can see that the information can be useful at a high level gui or in some
> kind of appstore. People there have bought 'foo' have also bought 'bar'. But
> at the lowlevel like rpm/yum is not very useful, because we don't have the
> needed infomation to make a good decision.

I wouldn't think it's that hard to implement.  When installing a new
package, simply treat Suggests as Requires; when removing a package
just ignore Suggests completely.  Only upgrading adds a little
complexity - if new version Suggests something that the old version
doesn't, treat it as Requires (so that I get new optional pony
accessories automatically), otherwise ignore it (so that I can throw
away that optional pink bracelet and not have it come back every time
I update).

-- 
Iain.