Debian Packaging Policy [OT]

Debian Packaging Policy [OT]

Posted Jul 5, 2010 8:30 UTC (Mon) by Felix.Braun (subscriber, #3032)
In reply to: digiKam in Ubuntu RECOMMENDS konqueror by bjartur
Parent article: A quick grumpy review of Shotwell

The difference as per Debian Packaging Policy is a matter of degree:

Depends

This declares an absolute dependency.

Recommends

This declares a strong, but not absolute, dependency.

Suggests

This is used to declare that one package may be more useful with one or more others.

I think that this fine-grained dependency tracking allows Debian (and derivatives) to strike a good compromise between simplicity and configurability in terms of dependency management.

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