[Pkg-owncloud-maintainers] Bug#760836: owncloud: should not recommend libreoffice
Jonathan Wiltshire
jmw at tiger-computing.co.uk
Fri Sep 12 10:00:08 UTC 2014
On 08/09/14 17:10, David Prévot wrote:
>> This isn't really very nice on a server for what is optional
>> functionality.
>
> Are the thumbnails really an optional functionality? I mean, they are
> provided by default, unless there are missing dependencies. Installing
> the needed packages to enable this feature seems to match the policy
> wording about Recommends (“The Recommends field should list packages
> that would be found together with this one in all but unusual
> installations.” 7.2).
They certainly aren't core functionality; that is, I could quite happily
use ownCloud without them and never know the difference. I think this is
preferable to installing such a long list of dependencies, and it's not
like I can't install them if I do want thumbnails.
>> I realise this is Recommends, not Depends, and that functionality can be
>> disabled. But we foresee this tripping up our engineers in the future,
>> and an accidental upgrade installing a raft of things we don't want.
>
> Is this bug actually about “bad” admins that may break the expectations
> of “good” admins? Is that the reason why you believe this issue is of
> important severity?
No, this is about not installing by default such a large amount of
desktop packages on a server. In general having recommends by default is
a good thing, but we should be careful not to undermine that by forcing
people to disable them for ownCloud.
>> Patch attached, with a slight difference from upstream:
>> libreoffice|libreoffice-writer gives users the opportunity to just have
>> libreoffice-writer if they wish.
>
> I’m not sure to follow the rationale of suggesting libreoffice-writer as
> an alternative (one may install whatever they want if they feel the need
> to, independently of what any package may suggest). The people
> suggesting libreoffice-writer in the upstream thread have been corrected
> more than once, what’s your rationale?
Nevertheless that package that falls out of their repository at the
moment Suggests:libreoffice-writer. I have no strong feelings either
way, and I agree that a simpler dependency is cleaner.
> If we are to consider demoting this recommended tool to a suggestion,
> why shouldn’t we do the same of the other tools used for thumbnails, as
> documented in the README (and the upstream admin documentation pulled in
> via owncloud-doc)?
I think there's a balance to be struck here between easy and lightweight
things and heavy things; for example, thumbnails for "PDF, svg, text,
images, movies, mp3 and various [but not all] office files" rely only on
imagemagick and avconv/ffmpeg, which are a small cost.
--
Jonathan Wiltshire
Tiger Computing Ltd
"Linux for Business"
Tel: 01600 483 484
Web: http://www.tiger-computing.co.uk
Follow us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/TigerComputing
Registered in England. Company number: 3389961
Registered address: Wyastone Business Park,
Wyastone Leys, Monmouth, NP25 3SR
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