On Debian and Fedora experiences
Matej Cepl
mcepl at redhat.com
Fri Dec 8 09:56:21 UTC 2006
Panu Matilainen scripst:
> Now, I do think soft dependencies *would* be a powerful feature,
> correctly and sparingly used and actually implemented in the tools. How
> I personally think it should be done, is two levels of soft dependencies
> (btw this is how Suse's rpm fork implements it, JBJ's rpm only has one
> level): there are strong and weak dependency hints.
IIRC, that's exactly what Debian has -- Recommends (according to the above
mentioned page) "declares a strong, but not absolute, dependency", whereas
Suggests
This is used to declare that one package may be more useful with
one or more others. Using this field tells the packaging system
and the user that the listed packages are related to this one and
can perhaps enhance its usefulness, but that installing this one
without them is perfectly reasonable.
Matěj
--
http://www.ceplovi.cz/matej/blog/, Jabber: ceplma<at>jabber.cz
GPG Finger: 89EF 4BC6 288A BF43 1BAB 25C3 E09F EF25 D964 84AC
They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of
human knowledge.
-- Thomas Brackett Reed
More information about the fedora-extras-list
mailing list