A dependency of the package 'magicrescue'

[Daniel J Blueman]

Hi Gergely,

On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 1:13 AM, Máté Gergely <gerymate at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Dan,
>
> 2008/10/27 Daniel J Blueman <daniel.blueman at gmail.com>:
>>> I have found that the package 'magicrescue' probably lacks one of its
>>> not-so-obvious dependency. Magicrescue is used to search for lost
>>> data. When magicrescue is used to search for lost JPEG files, it tries
>>> to use the program 'jpegtran', a tool located at the 'libjpeg-progs'
>>> package. However, installing the package 'magicrescue' does not
>>> install 'libjpeg-progs'.
>>
>> I believe this and other packages should be on the 'recommends' list,
>> since they aren't strict dependencies; the same applies for the
>> 'dcraw' package, used to extract camera raw images.
>>
>> Does this make sense? BTW, not sure if my mail will hit the list or not...
>
> The matter is that as someone tries to recover JPEG images, what is
> one of the about 10 basic use case for magicrescue, than libjpeg-progs
> becomes a dependency; in other words, the tool does not work without
> it.
>
> Magicrescue uses so called 'recipes' to recover different file types.
> One of the recipes installed by default is a recipe for JPEG. I think
> that either that recipe should not be included, or the packages needed
> to do the work should be installed.
>
> In the current state, the software offers to extract JPEG images with
> a single command line switch, but when that is chosen, it does not
> work properly. It simply complains about not finding 'jpegtran' any
> time it finds a lost JPEG. It even does not stop there: it continues
> with the search. Bad behavior...

I agree from a use-case point of view, and I personally think that
'easy' package managers should (by default) install all the
'recommended' dependencies, which should be there to allow experts to
de-select soft-dependencies. A good example is that on Fedora, IIRC
gnome-desktop has dependencies on evolution, but I'm a thunderbird
guy, so shouldn't pay the price of an extra 30MB+ of evolution bloat.

Perhaps for now, having the requirement of jpegtran etc is the best
immediate 'fix' we can do? We should stimulate some conversation about
the 'recommends' tags, since clearly, you could add hundreds of
binaries as (false) hard-dependencies and lock-in really a lot of
unneeded packages (eg openoffice) - perhaps the casual user is willing
for this, but the expert is not?

It's good to discuss this anyway,
  Dan

> Regards,
> Gergely
> (Hungarian names are in reverse order like Japanese :-) )
-- 
Daniel J Blueman