Bug#626352: arguments for bug

[Alan Woodland]

On 12 May 2011 21:59, Tomáš Hnyk <tomashnyk at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Nice to hear that others consider my decision for recommends reasonable.
>> The original poster might like to reread the guidelines when to use
>> Depends and when Recommends.
>
> Do you mean this:
> http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html ?
>
>
> "Depends
> This declares an absolute dependency
> The Depends field should be used if the depended-on package is required for
> the depending package to provide a significant amount of functionality.
>
> 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."
>
>> The fact that many <x>-data packages are
>> Depends is just because they fit the criterion that the package <x> really
>> does not work without <x>-data.  This is not the case for texmaker.
>
> Well, at least for the translations, I think that amounts to "significant
> amount of functionality" - consider someone who only speaks French and uses
> her system in French. If she installs with --no-install-recommends, she will
> get a program with interface she does not understand. Therefore, she will
> not be able to use the program or only with utmost difficulty. Therefore,
> the program will not be functioning for her. I think that is the reasoning
> of many of the <x> packages.
>
> So I will once again propose to split texmaker-data into texmaker-data
> depending on texmaker and including the icons and the translations and
> texmaker-docs being recommended by texmaker.

I sponsored the original upload of this package and IIRC the split was
largely based on arch: any vs. arch: all with recommends instead of
depends selected because it's neither broken nor useless without the
contents of -data, which in my view matched the description of
"strong, but not absolute".

The translations issue is an interesting one that perhaps warrants
further discussion -devel and/or explicit mention in policy. (I'm not
aware of any formal consensus). If the goal of --no-install-recommends
is "minimise" disk space then requiring all of the translations would
seem to be at odds with it. Then again not shipping the translations
seems to be at odds with the basic principles of userfriendlyness and
"play nicely with non-English languages". Is --no-install-recommends
pretty much equivalent to --no-unneeded-user-friendlyness though?

I have no strong opinions either way, but I'm interested in the
broader question from a policy POV.

Alan