[Pkg-libvirt-maintainers] Bug#747440: libguestfs0: Please demote libguestfs-gfs2 to suggests

[Laurent Bigonville]

Le Thu, 08 May 2014 23:08:31 +0200,
Hilko Bengen <bengen at hilluzination.de> a écrit :

Hello,

> * Laurent Bigonville:
> 
> > Could you please downgrade libguestfs-gfs2 to Suggests as
> > recommends are installed by default.
> 
> I am inclined to say: No.
> 
> With the split that I introduced in 1:1.26.1-3 (similar to what
> Richard has done for Fedora), it is possible to keep all the
> non-essential tools (those related to gfs2, xfs, jfs, zfs, etc.)
> uninstalled -- or uninstall them.
> 
> Users that don't want apt to automatically install "recommended"
> packages, should change the configuration.
> 
> But... that's my opinion, not the last word. (I'm not setting a
> "wontfix" tag.)

According to the policy a Recommends relationship is:

    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.

While the policy states about Suggests:

    This is used to declare that one package may be more useful with
    one or more others. Using this field tells the packaging system and
    the user that the listed packages are related to this one and can
    perhaps enhance its usefulness, but that installing this one
    without them is perfectly reasonable.


I would be tempted to say that a cluster filesystem is not for "usual
installations" at all. For the other local file systems I've no
objections, but this one seems to be pulling quite some dependencies
and daemons like corosync/openais (high availability software) and
seems pretty specialized to me.

Cheers,

Laurent Bigonville