Excessive package interdependency

[Tyler larson]

On Thu, 2003-12-18 at 01:32, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> The nautilus package dependencies was very deliberately added in order
> to get "full" feature support when someone upgrades. This was done when
> these packages was added to the distro, and without the dependency the
> new features would not be installed on an upgrade. We considered it more
> important that the majority of the Gnome desktop users didn't get half a
> desktop than that someone had to install a couple of megs of possibly
> unnecessary dependencies.
> 
> As long as there is no other way to handle this in the installer I stand
> by my decision.

I think this is the crux of the problem right here. The only method for
linking packages together that we currently have is through
dependencies. This lack of options therefore leads to kludges where we
say X depends on Y, not because there *actually is* a dependency, but so
that we can get the functionality of Y by default when the user installs
X.

This is obviously wrong, but is still the only option we currently have.
I think Aurelien's suggestion about a "Recommends" or "Suggests" list in
addition to "Requires" would make a lot more sense.

Such a change would certainly make the user's experience in finding
understanding packages a lot easer. I would suggest using "Requires:"
for true dependencies (i.e. won't run without), "Recommends:" for things
that that aren't absolutely necessary, but part of the default
functionality (such as spell checkers or CD burners) which would be
installed by default by s-c-packages and other installers unless the
user specifies otherwise.