[Bioperl-l] Are all recommended modules equally important ?

[Charles Plessy]

Dear Bioperl developpers,

In the Debian Project, we distribute packages for Bioperl and need to
express their dependancy to other Perl modules with "Depends",
"Recommends" and "Suggests" levels. For the moment, everything that is
listed in the "recommends" hash of Build.PL is "Recommended" by our
Debian package. This means that they will be installed by default when
installing Bioperl, but that users can force their removal if needed.

Being "Recommended" also means in Debian that if the recommended module
is not available, then the Debian bioperl package will not reach our
internal quality criteria for being part of our stable release.
Therefore I would like to know if you think that some of the modules
recommeded by Bioperl through the "recommends" hash of Build.PL are less
important than others, i.e. that we can just "Suggest" them in our
dependancy system. "Suggested" packages are not installed by default.

The complete definition of the meaning of "Depends", "Recommends" and
"Suggests" for Debian packages can be found in the section 7.2 of the
Debian policy:

http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html

Debian distributes versions 1.4 and 1.5.2 of Bioperl, but considers
using 1.5.2 in its next stable release. We welcome your comments on this
as well.

The Debian package for Bioperl 1.4: http://packages.debian.org/lenny/bioperl
and for Bioperl 1.5.2: http://packages.debian.org/sid/bioperl

(A copy of this email has been sent to the mailing list of the
Debian-Med project).

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles Plessy
http://charles.plessy.org
Wakō, Saitama, Japan