On Debian and Fedora experiences

[Denis Leroy]

Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Monday 04 December 2006 08:34, Matej Cepl wrote:
>> And one more I forgot -- I really miss Suggests: and Recommends: Having
>> aalib required to be installed (take a look at rpm -qi aalib -- do you
>> think you really need it?) makes me really home-sick after Debian.
> 
> And how do you expect automated tools to handle these soft requirements?  
> Either you always install them, or you never do, which basically brings up 
> the question, whats the point?  Why do this instead of just Requires or not?
> 
> A far better solution is to split the libraries that would use say aalib into 
> a subpackage so that you can install the base package without needing aalib, 
> and choose to install the subpackage that might pull in the aalib dep.  The 
> OLPC project has helped to identify a lot of these scenarios and to split out 
> functionality as such.

But the problem is: how does a 100%-gui-using end-user find out about 
this ? I personally think there is a need for something like 
Recommends:, if only for the goal of informing the end-user that 
installing "majorapp" is not enough, he/she should probably also 
consider installing "majorapp-feature1" and "majorapp-feature2" as 
well... Could this information live at a higher layer though ?