Getting rid of circular dependencies, stage 5

[Benjamin Mesing]

[It's been a while since this message hit the debtags-devel list, thus I
include an almost full quote as well as CCing the participants of the
discussion, please follow up on debtags-devel@ or CC it in responses]

[Response below]

On Mon, 2006-07-31 at 17:14 +0000, Thaddeus H. Black wrote:
> The following has appeared on debian-devel, but might (or might not) be
> thought more interesting here.  I would add to the post my remark that
> the existing "Recommends:" control field does already provide more or
> less the metadata the poster suggests, but his point is interesting
> nevertheless.
> 
> ----- Forwarded message from Dominique Dumont <domi at komarr.grenoble.hp.com> -----
> 
> From: Dominique Dumont <domi at komarr.grenoble.hp.com>
> To: debian-devel at lists.debian.org
> Subject: Re: Getting rid of circular dependencies, stage 5
> Resent-Date: Tue, 25 Jul 2006 04:18:44 -0500 (CDT)
> 
> Joey Hess <joeyh at debian.org> writes:
> 
> > Steve Greenland wrote:
> >> Sure, it allows some one to install foo-data without the program that
> >> uses it? So what? It's unlikely to happen by accident, and annoying to
> >> those doing it intentionally. (Just like those foo-docs that depend on
> >> foo, although they are mostly fixed, now.)
> >
> > I don't buy the often-made argument that foo-data packages are
> > generally useful to install just to look at the beautiful data.
> 
> As a casual user, if I want the "foo" functionality, I'll probably
> want to install foo and not even look at foo-data.
> 
> Another point of view of this problem can be expressed this way:
> - foo without foo-data is *broken* hence the need for a dependency.
> - foo-data without foo is not broken (because there's not program to
>   invoke), but is *useless*.
> 
> May be a better solution would be to flag foo-data as "useless alone".
> 
> (I would love to be able to hide from aptitude all these "useless
> alone" packages so I could sift faster in the package list).

In the debtags vocabulary there is a tag which seems perfectly suitable
to express that: 'special::auto-inst-parts - Secondary packages users
won't install directly'.

Best regards 

Ben