https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40842
--- Comment #6 from Sebastian Lackner sebastian@fds-team.de --- (In reply to sworddragon2 from comment #5)
I'm using a minimalistic system and have disabled at default the installation of recommended packages in apt. Also I think this topic can be extended to more packages as for example if libxcursor1 is missing mouse cursors are not being rendered correctly and if libxi6 is missing raw input does not work.
For people trying to run Wine on a minimal system (for example with limited disk space), the overhead of installing a lot of additional packages is probably not acceptable - especially when they are not required for the applications they would like to run. By adding such packages as recommendation instead of fixed dependency we leave the choice to the user, which would not be possible otherwise.
Also please note that the installation instructions on https://wiki.winehq.org/Ubuntu suggests the following line for installing the package, which should effectively treat all recommendations as dependencies:
sudo apt-get install --install-recommends winehq-devel
Some reasons why I think a reconsideration what should be a dependency and what should be a recommendation is needed:
- Ubuntu installs at default recommended packages so in this case it would
not make an effective difference if the packages would be a dependency or a recommendation. But the few users that do not install recommended packages at default will notice earlier or later issues on normal usage.
When they use the commandline mentioned on the Wiki it should still work, no?
- From the debian policy about Depends: "The Depends field should be used if
the depended-on package is required for the depending package to provide a significant amount of functionality.". Sine Wine provides the Windows API for non-Windows systems a working mouse and working PNG-support are in my opinion indeed significant.
I guess it really depends on the use-case. For someone who wants to run console applications only, the lack of those components might be harmless. Although Windows applications might probably not behave as expected, for Wine itself its absolutely fine when such dependencies are missing. Wine is not statically linked against them, and they are loaded at runtime when required.
- Even if the installaion of recommended packages is not disabled apt does
not always guarantee that they are getting installed. I have reported this already here ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apt/+bug/1571363 ) but it is not known if this is intended or just a bug. At least this is how apt handles this now for several years or even more. The 3 packages used as example here are also affected by this behavior and may not get installed even on executing "apt-get install winehq-devel --install-recommends". How much this affects a real system may depend how long the installation exists/how often the package state got changed. Over time systems might end up with the one or other recommended package missing causing eventually the user to notice an issue and creating a bogus report.
I'm not sure why the command does not work for you although the packages are available, this should not be the case. If the packages are not available however, it is intentional that they are skipped instead of failing the installation. In most cases (for example, trouble with installing a rarely used component) this is better than being too strict.
To sum it up, although I agree that changing some of the recommendations to a fixed dependency might have some advantages, I am not sure if we should add "unnecessary" restrictions, which might block a user from using the package. @ Michael: What do you think?