Re: Introducing DoudouLinux

On Sat, Aug 13, 2011 at 12:02:12AM +0200, Jean-Michel Philippe wrote:
>> in most cases the set of dependencies is not choosen the way it is on
>> purpose but due to a lack of user requirements.  Just express your
>> requirements apropriately and fix the thing inside Debian.
>
> Do you mean there are official rules to set recommendations and  
> suggestions, which I'm not aware of?

What do you mean by "official rules"? :-)

The maintainer of the package chooses Recommends and Suggest according
to his best knowledge.  Any user can write a bug report if he thinks the
choice was not properly / optimal done.  This are the rules - I can not
honestly believe you are not aware of the second part. :-)

> What I mean is how can you surely conclude a package dependency is  
> wrong? Let's suppose a large package is using a single command of  
> ImageMagick. It may be quite difficult to find out that this dependency,  
> although not very desirable, is still necessary.

It does not matter how complicated it might be to find out whether a
dependency is necessary or not. *If* it is necessary it needs to be
in the list of dependencies - if not this is a bug.

>> Once I considered "Conflicts" inside metapackages.  We did not tried
>> this yet (because there was no actual need for it (at least not
>> explicitely expressed to me).  What do you think about this option?
>
> Conflicts would not prevent from installing the whole meta-package,  
> instead of putting unwanted packages of the meta-package list aside?

If a conflicting package is installed on the system you can not install
the metapackage and the package management program (aptitude, synaptic,
...) will warn you about this and ask for advise.

> We're using SVN for our project, so no problem to edit these files by  
> myself. Except that I'd need SVN write access :).

Create a login at alioth.debian.org and ask for inclusion in the Debian
Pure Blends project - this will grant you write access.

> Note that Debian Jr.  
> audience is large in age than our current one. I wonder if Debian Jr.  
> should not split its packages to reflect main children skill evolutions  
> (I don't like to classify by age because skills may vary a lot between  
> children of the same age, depending on their environment and  
> preferences).

I'm afraid the current *audience* is that small that you do not need to
bother about splitting / whatever.  Just go on and do what you consider
reasonable.

Kind regards

       Andreas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de