evince is marked as an add-on of gnumeric

[Andrew]

Binary package hint: software-center

In software-center, evince is marked as an add-on of gnumeric - this is incorrect, they are completely different applications.

This is because gnumeric has 'evince' in it's 'Recommends:' field - this should be removed.

[Mohamed Amine Ilidrissi (ilidrissi.amine)]

This is because gnumeric recommends evince, so we can't do much in this case.

[Lionel Le Folgoc (mrpouit)]

> This is because gnumeric recommends evince, so we can't do much in this case.

Why? The recommendation is fine… The bug is rather in software-center.

[Andrew (and471)]

@Lionel
As I have no experience with the gnumeric package, why is it that gnumeric recommends evince?

[Lionel Le Folgoc (mrpouit)]

AFAIK, it is used by the print preview.

[Andrew (and471)]

In this case, shouldn't it be Suggests?

(From Debian Policy Manual):

"Recommends
    This declares a strong, but not absolute, dependency.
    The Recommends field should list packages that would be found together with this one in all but unusual installations.

Suggests
    This is used to declare that one package may be more useful with one or more others. Using this field tells the packaging system and the user that the listed packages are related to this one and can perhaps enhance its usefulness, but that installing this one without them is perfectly reasonable."

[Charlie Kravetz (cjkgeek)]

Without Evince, there is no print preview ability in Gnumeric. So, if this is changed to suggests, users will report how many times that the print preview failed? And it will only be fixed by making it a recommends again.

[Andrew (and471)]

In default Ubuntu/GNOME install evince is installed anyway, so I don't think users reporting bugs about it should be a problem.

I don't feel as though Print Preview is a major part of gnumeric either, it is useful, but it is not essential, a user can still print without it.

As for it failing, if this is the case (i.e. it does not degrade gracefully) then this is a bug in gnumeric, it should not heavily depend on it so much -otherwise it should be marked as Depends

[Charlie Kravetz (cjkgeek)]

Hm, So, since evince is a part of Ubuntu installations, Xubuntu should go through extra work with bugs? Xubuntu installs gnumeric as the default spreadsheet application. Ubuntu installs OpenOffice instead. For those of us that actually use spreadsheets, it is rather cumbersome to have 50 blank pages printed because there was no print preview and we forgot to mark the print area first. I welcome opinions, but mine is that a preview in a spreadsheet is absolutely essential.

[Lionel Le Folgoc (mrpouit)]

Re-read your policy quote: "This declares a strong, but not absolute, dependency.". Gnumeric can work without evince (so not absolute), but you lose features, and AFAIK, it's doesn't degrade gracefully (no feedback at all except in .xsession-errors?).

Anyway, we're not going to make xubuntu/gnumeric users lose features because the software-center spec is a bit "special" (not to say it's too late in the release development cycle). But, since we merge it from Debian, if you can convince the Debian maintainer to demote evince to Suggests, it'll be changed in ubuntu as well with the next merge (same if upstream adds a graceful fallback).