downgrading recommends in rosegarden

[Stuart Prescott]

Hi Alessio,

I see that you've recently changed the recommends on konqueror and okular down 
to suggests in rosegarden:

diff --git a/debian/control b/debian/control
index 871f7b3..f93662e 100644 (file)
--- a/debian/control
+++ b/debian/control
@@ -43,11 +43,11 @@ Recommends:
  cups-bsd | lpr,
  ghostscript,
  jackd,
- konqueror | www-browser,
  lilypond,
- okular | pdf-viewer,
  swh-plugins | ladspa-plugin
 Suggests:
+ konqueror | www-browser,
+ okular | pdf-viewer,
  qjackctl
 Description: music editor and MIDI/audio sequencer
  Rosegarden is a Qt application which provides a mixed Audio/MIDI


I don't believe this is a sensible change -- sure a user reported a bug 
(#652300) suggesting that this be done, but not all bugs are valid and I don't 
believe this one is. 

If the user had already installed a pdf viewer and web browser, this wouldn't 
have been a problem -- perhaps the real bug is that xfce did not do so by 
default. Now, users will complain that they get weird error messages when 
trying to view the exported PDF etc. I'd rather have a default installation be 
functional and leave further tweaking to the local admin if they want it 
rather than present the user with broken functionality by default and require 
them to figure out which bits are missing.

Does rosegarden generate nice error messages when these soft-depends are not 
installed? (I thought it used to which is why I left them as Recommends not 
Depends, but now, all I get is things like:

[generic]  ProgressDialog::ProgressDialog -  "Exporting LilyPond file..." 
Segmentation fault

if lilypond or a pdf viewer are not installed, which is clearly suboptimal, 
will lead to data loss etc)

Personally, I was just about to -done that bug with an explanation of why they 
are Recommends and why that is the right thing for them. The only reason I'd 
not done so yet was because I wanted to discuss it with my comaintainers 
first...

My suggestion is to revert that change. Perhaps also looking more into how 
recent rosegarden behave with missing (optional) dependencies.

cheers
Stuart


-- 
Stuart Prescott    --    www.nanonanonano.net
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