If I understand correctly, Zandr is trying to install darcs on a  
Debian or Ubuntu box which has no mailer.  He isn't going to use the  
darcs e-mail integration feature.

Regards,

Zooko

---
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Hi Zooko,

> If I understand correctly, Zandr is trying to install darcs on a
> Debian or Ubuntu box which has no mailer.  He isn't going to use the
> darcs e-mail integration feature.

Please report bugs in Debian integration to the Debian bug tracker.
You can do this on Debian thusly:

    apt-get install reportbug
    reportbug darcs

But I think reportbug still silently discards your bug reports on
Ubuntu, so don't use it there!  Ubuntu users should report Ubuntu
integration bugs to launchpad.net, which I know nothing about.  From
there, Laney will probably forward any relevant issues to me.

On to your issue!

Currently Debian's Darcs package Recommends a mail transport agent
(MTA), defaulting to exim4.  The Recommends relationship is basically
defined as "don't break this dependency unless you know what you're
doing", and it is there because "darcs send" doesn't include an SMTP
client.  You can consider that part WONTFIX.

Recently, Recommends relationships became "opt out" instead of "opt
in", meaning that newbies actually get the correct behaviour.  (This
annoyed a lot of people because many packages use Recommends where
they mean Suggests.)  But you can still opt out of recommendations by
doing something like

    aptitude --without-recommends install darcs

or

    aptitude install darcs exim4-

or by running aptitude in interactive (GUI) mode, selecting darcs for
installation, then selecting exim4 and using the "-" key to prevent
its installation.

I assume that other package managers like synaptic have some similar
means of opting out of Recommends relationships, but I don't know what
it is.

I'm having trouble assigning this bug to myself via email.  Maybe it only works if I have a noisy comment?

Zooko,

Do you consider this bug now resolved?  It seems that way to me.

well, it was really Zandr who was the original bug reporter.  The thing about
debian "recommends" becoming opt-out seems like a good explanation to me.

Why don't you ask Zandr if he thinks it is resolved.

Hi Zandr,

Please take a moment to read the comments at
http://bugs.darcs.net/issue1203 and let me know if there's anything
else the Darcs team can do for you regarding this issue.

This was on Intrepid at a customer site, so it's not a case I can reproduce
quickly. I'll have a sandbox to try this in soon.

I suspect you're right that the change in apt behavior caused darcs to drag
along a mailer. I'll have to go read the definitions of "Recommends" and
"Suggests", but I think I'm in the camp of "annoyed", because dragging along a
mailer for a source control tool shouldn't be default behavior.

Feel free to close this, I can always come back and reopen it if there's
something else going on.