On Tue, 2009-05-26 at 23:00 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote: > On 05/26/2009 10:27 PM, Iain Arnell wrote: > > On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 7:10 AM, Tim Lauridsen > > <tim.lauridsen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> > >> soft-deps (Suggests/Recommends) is really hard to handle at the depsolver > >> level. A depsolver need to now the hard ones, not stuff like 'it would look > >> very nice to have pink bracelet to my little pony'. It is hard to make good > >> decisions based on that, a asking the user every time is not a good solution > >> IMO. You will need to take a popquiz every time you what to install a > >> package. > >> I can see that the information can be useful at a high level gui or in some > >> kind of appstore. People there have bought 'foo' have also bought 'bar'. But > >> at the lowlevel like rpm/yum is not very useful, because we don't have the > >> needed infomation to make a good decision. > > > > I wouldn't think it's that hard to implement. When installing a new > > package, simply treat Suggests as Requires; when removing a package > > just ignore Suggests completely. Only upgrading adds a little > > complexity - if new version Suggests something that the old version > > doesn't, treat it as Requires (so that I get new optional pony > > accessories automatically), otherwise ignore it (so that I can throw > > away that optional pink bracelet and not have it come back every time > > I update). > > > Note that that would be horrible behaviour for also keeping a minimal > packageset. Iain's suggestion is how it is handled in Mandriva. There is a parameter for urpmi (yum equivalent) - --no-suggests - which inverts the behaviour (suggested packages are not considered dependencies and not installed), and this can be set permanently in urpmi's global config file, for those who prefer to keep minimal package sets. this has worked well for two or three releases now, I haven't seen any complaints about it. when urpmi lists the packages that will be installed as dependencies in a transaction, those that are suggests rather than hard requires are tagged as such, so you can notice if a transaction is introducing a large number of suggested deps you may not necessarily want, and switch to --no-suggests. I believe Debian handles things in a similar way, although it has a more complex setup (there are also Recommends, and Enhances, which is sort of Suggests pointing in the other direction. I'm not sure how those are used.) -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
