With things like apt recommends and such I don't think this is a huge problem.
I don’t believe there is a similar widely-supported dependency type in yum/rpm, though. rpm 4.12 adds support for Weak Dependencies, which have Recommends/Suggests-style semantics, but AFAIK it’s not going to be on most RPM machines (I haven’t checked most OSes yet, but IIRC it’s mostly a Fedora thing at this point?)
Which means in the rpm packages we’ll have to decide whether this is required or must be opt-in by end users (which as discussed would hurt adoption).
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Jason Petersen
Software Engineer | Citus Data
303.736.9255
