Universe Recommends for packages in main

[Colin Watson]

On Sun, Jul 06, 2008 at 02:58:08PM +0100, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 04, 2008 at 05:45:01PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> > It's "perfectly reasonable" to install OpenOffice.org without support
> > for importing 1.x documents and without support for LaTeX output,
> > although those features "enhance its usefulness". I definitely don't
> > think they meet the criterion of "all but unusual installations".
> > 
> > As I said, I think Java is on the boundary between those two
> > definitions, but seeing as the "usual" installation of Ubuntu is what
> > you get from a CD and we have been managing to cope so far, I think
> > there's a case that installing OOo without Java is "perfectly
> > reasonable".
> 
> I thought we had included the oo.o Java bits until recently, and they were
> dropped in error.

While it was something of a mistake that they were dropped, we have now
partially compensated for it by means of a helpful message telling the
user what to do in case they run into a case where Java is needed (see
LP #218692), and given size constraints I think there's a good case that
we should extend those compensating measures (e.g. provide a button that
you can click to have the system install openoffice.org-java-common for
you) rather than restoring Java.

(Failing that, perhaps somebody can suggest some other way for us to
make significant progress towards clawing back 80MB from the desktop CD
at a *package* level, without relying on extensive untried
infrastructure.)

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]