On Debian and Fedora experiences

[Matej Cepl]

Panu Matilainen scripst:
> Now, I do think soft dependencies *would* be a powerful feature,
> correctly and sparingly used and actually implemented in the tools. How
> I personally think it should be done, is two levels of soft dependencies
> (btw this is how Suse's rpm fork implements it, JBJ's rpm only has one
> level): there are strong and weak dependency hints.

IIRC, that's exactly what Debian has -- Recommends (according to the above
mentioned page) "declares a strong, but not absolute, dependency", whereas
Suggests

	This is used to declare that one package may be more useful with
	one or more others. Using this field tells the packaging system
	and the user that the listed packages are related to this one and
	can perhaps enhance its usefulness, but that installing this one
	without them is perfectly reasonable.

Matěj

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