On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 8:20 PM Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro(a)redhat.com> wrote:
On Wed, Jan 18 2023 at 10:19:24 AM -0800, Gordon Messmer
<gordon.messmer(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Several people suggested using a weak dependency (Suggests:) on the
> iscsi driver, but I don't think that would solve the problem for most
> users because weak dependencies are installed by default and nothing
> really communicates to users that unless they add an obscure option,
> their boot times will increase.
No, Suggests basically does nothing. See this table here:
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/packaging-guidelines/WeakDependencies/
Recommends and Supplements are real dependencies that are installed
automatically but which you can opt out of. Suggests and Enhances are
just kinda there, and will not be installed automatically. Not sure if
they are really useful.
Suggests are useful for the case where multiple packages (let's say
packages A and B) provide "foo", a package C depends on something that
provides "foo" (i.e. works with both A and B), but C prefers A over B
if neither of them are installed yet. Then package C can add
"Suggests: B" to make dependency resolution preferentially resolve
"Requires: foo" to B. Otherwise, dependency resolution apparently
prefers packages that sort lower alphabetically (so A instead of B, in
this simplified example).
Fabio