Re: Removing web server dependencies from web apps

[Aron Xu <happyaron.xu@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 16:34, Neil Williams <codehelp@debian.org> wrote:
> On Fri, 06 Jan 2012 15:56:37 +0800
> Thomas Goirand <thomas@goirand.fr> wrote:
>
>> The issue is that most PHP packages in Debian have dependencies on web
>> servers, most of the time with something like this:
>>
>> Depends: apache2 | httpd, libapache2-mod-php5 | php5-cgi
>
> Sounds like the situation for which equivs was designed.
>
>> Remember that a strong dependency is *forcing* users to install things,
>
> Not quite. A strong dependency requires that something with that name
> is installed - it can just as easily be an empty package which just
> matches the name. Put that package into your chroots and the problems
> disappear.
>

Disagrees. Debian can't require all users/administrators of a package
to learn how to
*make your own empty package* when the dependency is actually
unnecessary. It that
were me, I'll rebuild the webapp package and remove whatever I don't
like, which is
not reasonable for common users either.

I support to downgrade those Depends to Recommends.


-- 
Regards,
Aron Xu