Re: Bug#21691: perl-base is essential nothing should Depend: on it.
On Tue, Apr 28, 1998 at 01:14:46PM -0700, Darren/Torin/Who Ever... wrote:
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> Enrique Zanardi, in an immanent manifestation of deity, wrote:
> >> P.S. Why is data-dumper in base?
> >'Cause libnet-perl depends on it.
>
> Sorry, I mis-stated the question. Why does libnet-perl depend on
> data-dumper in base. I thought we (as in debian-devel) had discussed
> not asking the libnet-perl configuration questions during install.
> Since Net::Config is the only place where Data::Dumper is used, it
> probably shouldn't be depended on for base.
Some random thoughts about packages in base (talking here about
libnet-perl, but the same is valid to any other package in there):
libnet-perl in base is the same libnet-perl package we have in the FTP
archive, with the same dependencies. As we don't have (yet?) a way to
force the automatic upgrade of a package, if I modify libnet-perl
dependencies in the base system (by "editing" dpkg databases, using
libdpkg), the user would have to know that and upgrade to the "right"
version, to be able to reconfig the package. I may edit the databases to
"downgrade" the package version too, but then the maintainer will have to
know that when a user reports a bug in libnet-perl_AAA-BbaseC, he is
talking about _the_same_ libnet-perl_AAA-B built by the maintainer, only
the information in the control file (Version: and Depends: for
libnet-perl) would have changed.
If I simply remove data-dumper from the base system, but libnet-perl
(the package) still depends on it, the user may have problems when doing
an upgrade, because the base system is in a "broken" state wrt
dependencies.
OTOH, I remember someone said the latest libnet version in CPAN doesn't
need data-dumper at all. Can anyone confirm that?
Thanks,
--
Enrique Zanardi ezanardi@ull.es
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