Bug#161849: general: many packages still depend on textutils|shellutils|fileutils

[Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org>]

On Sun, Sep 22, 2002 at 01:47:15AM +0000, Brian M. Carlson wrote:
> Package: general
> Version: unavailable; reported 2002-09-22
> Severity: important
> Tags: sid
>
> I am filing a general bug instead of filing mass bug reports on the 21
> broken packages on my system. Packages should now depend on coreutils
> instead of fileutils, shellutils, or textutils, 

Actually, packages should *not* normally depend on coreutils, as it is
in base. The only time a depends is required is if you need a particular
version. It's extremely unlikely that anyone would need a versioned
depend on coreutils at this time. :) 

Most of the versioned dependencies are pretty old--I urge maintainers to
consider whether they really need to try to ease upgrades by depending
on packages from the rex era. (Hint, such upgrades will run into
problems *long* before a fileutils dependency is an issue.) If you're
really worried about that you'll probably want something like "Depends:
fileutils (>> really_old_version) | coreutils"

Mike Stone