RPM Weak Dependencies and the install media compose process

Josh Boyer jwboyer at fedoraproject.org
Fri Jul 10 21:12:42 UTC 2015


On Fri, Jul 10, 2015 at 5:03 PM, Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 10, 2015 at 08:05:24AM -0400, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
>> 1) Follow the default DNF behavior: Requires: and Recommends: packages
>> are included on the install media (and therefore also installed
>> together onto the target system)
>
> Can this have the inverse of the case in #3 (where Recommends are
> followed by default, but could be explicitly removed by choice)?
>
>> 3) Include only Requires: dependencies by default and require spin
>> -kickstarts owners to explicitly add any Recommends or Suggests
>> packages that they also want to include. Packages added explicitly will
>> be installed as described in 2) (requiring additional comps.xml changes
>> to include Suggests stuff)
>
> I think I'm in favor of this one. I think a lot of the Recommends are
> likely to be there because the recommended package is large or has a
> large dep chain, and that might not be ideal for the install media.

Then maybe packagers should be using Suggests for those additional
packages.  Recommends to me means "the packager thinks the best
experience includes this functionality."  That is certainly still a
tradeoff, but it is a much stronger implication on the packagers part.
It also matches the later installation experience.

josh


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