[Mageia-dev] [changelog] [RPM] cauldron core/release task-gnome-3.3.2-4.mga2

Mon Feb 13 17:02:15 CET 2012

Le lundi 13 février 2012 à 10:35 +0100, Thierry Vignaud a écrit :
+> On 13 February 2012 10:05, Olav Vitters <olav at vitters.nl> wrote:
+> >> - Suggests drakconf in minimal package
+> >
+> > Why as part of task-gnome*, shouldn't it be a require elsewhere?
+> 
+> 1) for symmetry with task-kde4-minimal
+>     It should be done in task-{lxde,xfce,..} of course
+
+Then it should be documented, because currently, task-* is polluted.
+Since everybody add his pet peeves packages as task-*, that cause the
+same problem that was intended to solve, ie too much choice. People have
+the warm fuzzy feeling of having a selected and taylored set of rpm, but
+that's far from the truth.
+
+Also, it abuses suggests and interact in a weird way with auto-orphans
+( or it should be better to say that it make it dangerous for users to
+use the feature, thanks to the lack of semantics for Suggests, coupled
+with lack of clear semantics on task-* and the abuse of the 2nd one by
+the first one coupled with a too simple UI ).
+
+> 2) so that people performing minimal install then installing task-foobar
+>     got mcc too
+>     (it's done at installer time through rpmsrate which is not used after
+>     installation by urpmi -- else nothing will pull it[1])
+
+So basically, that's duplication of information ? 
+
+> 3) because that's the right place to do it
+> 
+> Note it's a suggests, not a hard requires
+
+Suggests semantics are still unclear. For now, that's "let me use this
+to push totally unrelated packages in the default setup because I think
+they should be installed but I have no way to explain why, and they are
+important but not important enough to be documented or selected at
+runtime". And that's far from being ideal.
+
+In fact, the more I can think of, the more I wonder what was the problem
+we wanted to solve with Suggests, and if we really did. The UI is near 0
+and will be for a long time, since there isn't enough expressiveness in
+a rpm tag for that. Advanced users, who are concerned with deps and what
+is installed either remove suggests ( my case, because it pull lots of
+unneeded stuff ), or just do without it for finding related packages
+( because you still need to look on why something is pulled, and you
+cannot really select ( not that asking a 100 questions would be good
+OTOH )).
+
+Less advanced users do not care at all about suggests in the best case
+( ie, it solved almost nothing for them ), and end with auto-orphans
+doing weird stuff. It also have a weird interaction model on upgrade
+( like "if task-kde4 is installed, do I want to also pull all suggests,
+even those I removed, or do I want to not do it, and then end with a
+different result than from a fresh installation" )
+
+So I would suggests ( no pun intended ) to just drop them. Keeping them
+make us diverge from upstream, afaik, requires various hack with some
+side effect and extra documentation for almost nothing ( ie, since we
+may not have solved a real problem ), and think to do think another way.
+ 
+-- 
+Michael Scherer
+
+