Excessive package interdependency

[Jeremy Katz]

On Thu, 2003-12-18 at 16:46 -0500, Chris Ricker wrote:
> It is collected to some extent. There's always a list at the end of the 
> RELEASE-NOTES file....

Which has no guarantee of being complete -- it's again big ticket items
that people think about getting put in there.

> Perhaps an alternative on upgrades would just be to say that all installed 
> apps are being upgraded, and ask the user if they'd like a list of 
> available applications which could be added during installation?

I'd say I have a lot of packages installed on my machines (all have at
least 1000, many more).  But even in that case, I'm going to have a list
of 500 or so packages to go through with something like this.  And it's
going to include a lot of cruft and things that aren't useful leaf
packages.

I argue very strongly that users should *never* see the choice "do you
want to install libfoo".  But if you leave out everything that has a
dependent package, you also lose useful things (eg, nautilus-cd-burner
depends on nautilus, but you still obviously want to show nautilus in
anything like this)

And so I get back to needing a manual list which history proves does not
work at all.

Jeremy