Re: Policy for adding DEPENDS

[Alistair Crooks <agc%pkgsrc.org@localhost>]

Actually, I like this suggestion - one of the weaknesses of pkgsrc's
infrastructure is that it's all or nothing right now, and that can
work sometimes, and other times not. Some packagers err on the side of
minimalism, others on the side of bling. To be blunt, we've dodged the
issue for 20 years, and it's probably something that should be
addressed soon. :)

I imagine binary packages are just built with the DEPENDS and
RECOMMENDS included? If so, I'm not seeing any difference for binary
package users. For source builders, it'd be nice, but a lot of the
work most recently has been in binary packaging, so just trying to get
a feel for these things.

Thanks,
Alistair

On 13 June 2017 at 09:14, Taylor R Campbell
<campbell+netbsd-tech-pkg%mumble.net@localhost> wrote:
>> Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2017 16:43:11 +0200
>> From: Edgar Fuß <ef%math.uni-bonn.de@localhost>
>>
>> What's the policy for adding a DEPENDS to a package?
>>
>> I spent the better half of yesterday's working day tracking down why I
>> couldn't print plain text files with CUPS 2.1 (print/cups) and the filters
>> (print/cups-filters). It turned out to be a missing font and I ended up
>> looking up the corresponding Debian packages Depends: lines to find I
>> needed to install fonts/freefont-ttf.
>>
>> I was about to file a PR about a missing DEPENDS in print/cups-filters,
>> but one could argue you can install a different font package, print all
>> sorts of other formats just fine without the font or only need cups-browsed
>> (included in the same package) and not care about working filters at all.
>
> Maybe we should adopt RECOMMENDS or SUGGESTS variants of DEPENDS like
> Debian has:
>
> - DEPENDS is mandatory and always installed.
> - RECOMMENDS is optional, but by default installed.
> - SUGGESTS is optional, and by default not installed.
>