[Pkg-bluetooth-maintainers] Bug#448553: Bug#448553: bluez-utils should not recommend bluez-gnome

[Frans Pop]

On Sunday 13 April 2008, Filippo Giunchedi wrote:
> > 'bluetooth' is installed by the 'laptop' task and depends on
> > 'bluez-utils', so the latter should not recommend 'bluez-gnome'. (not
> > all the usual installations with the 'laptop' task should require tens
> > of GNOME-related packages).
>
> I am not sure how to fix this, given that recommends are automatically
> installed. A proposal:

However, at the moment Recommends are _not_ installed automatically by 
Debian Installer when installing tasks. This is basically because it would 
result in tons of additional packages getting installed, most of which 
users have no use for.
So this problem is currently limited to users installing bluetooth manually 
and, which is the real problem IMO, situations where bluetooth gets pulled 
in automatically by other packages (e.g. a KDE lib that depends on it).

> bluez-utils:
>     suggests: bluez-firmare, bluez-audio, bluez-gnome
>
> bluetooth:
>     depends: bluez-utils
>     recommends: bluez-audio, bluez-gnome
>
> with the rationale that installing bluetooth the user is expected to get
> more than from bluez-utils.
> This however would not solve OP's bug, thus I'm asking for some ideas.

The Debian Policy manual defines Recommends as:
 This declares a strong, but not absolute, dependency. 
 The Recommends field should list packages that would be found together with
 this one in all but unusual installations.

As bluetooth is a generic stack and thus useful on all systems that support 
it, and bluez-gnome is GNOME specific and GNOME is only one desktop option 
of many, it should be clear that "bluetooth recommends bluez-gnome" does 
not fit the definition of Recommends: they will often *not* be found 
together. I'm not sure of bluez-audio as I've no idea what it does, but I 
suspect the same to be true there.

Note that this is a huge general problem in Debian ATM: packages 
recommending other packages that do not fit that definition.

Cheers,
FJP

P.S. This is just my personal opinion.
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