On Mon, 2 Sep 2002, Jan Schaumann wrote:

> >   - usefulness; I can't really think of any examples where
> >     SUGGESTS would provide any added functionality over
> >     meta-packages.
>
> meta-packages are useful for packages that combine a whole bunch of
> related things, such as kde3 or gnome.  However, we wouldn't want to
> create tons and tons of meta-pkgs just to suggest that the user looks at
> another package they might be interested in.

I agree.

> wm/blackbox:
> 	a window manager that does not include keybindings.  Thus,
> 	virtually every user will want to use an extra keygrabber.
> 	Almost all blackbox users use wm/bbkeys, but there are other
> 	key-grabbers that would work equally well, thus, bbkeys can
> 	not be a dependency.  blackbox should suggest bbkeys

Well, you could force bbkeys as a dependency anyways. Probably less than
one percent of blackbox users don't use bbkeys.

> The point being that it may be helpful for a package to just say "Hey,
> this other package works really well with this one;  strictly speaking,
> you don't NEED it, but you might want it."  Of course, every user can
> just find out about these things on their own, but for convenience this
> might be nice.

I think this is an excellent idea for making NetBSD friendly for
end-users.

> TAKE_SUGGESTS can be set to YES, NO, and ASK.  YES accepts all
> suggestions, NO rejects all.  ASK makes 'make' ask for every single
> suggestion.  Did you not notice the 'ASK' option?

I like the ASK idea too.

This is especially useful for the patches I am about to propose: by
suggesting a blackbox-menus package for blackbox, icewm-menus for icewm,
etc. (I first discussed back in January 2001; I'll be sharing the patches
soon for packages to provide menu entries.)

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://bsd.reedmedia.net/