On Sat, Sep 08, 2012 at 10:01:17PM +1000, Dmitry Smirnov wrote: > On Sat, 8 Sep 2012 19:37:33 Holger Levsen wrote: > > "optional depends" - what?? Thats self contradictory. If a depends it's > > really optional, it's not a depends, thus that package is buggy and should > > not be fixed by introducing a nonsense package, but by removing this > > depends. > > Not at all, it may appears "self contradictory" only because debian/control > "language" doesn't have a right term for it. Or perhaps my wording is not > perfect. If you got the idea, can you suggest a better word? > > Imagine a software that builds without a certain -dev package. When present > this package may be used to activate an additional (optional) feature. Debian users depend on the package being built in a consistent way. For example, some packages are built with Kerberos support. While this is generally optional for most packages, I'd be very upset if, say, the Debian openssh-server package suddenly lost support for Kerberos because the maintainer or someone doing an NMU didn't have the appropriate -dev package installed, since it would mean that package would suddenly fail to work in a major way for me. Your proposed solution would remove an important safety check. -- brian m. carlson / brian with sandals: Houston, Texas, US +1 832 623 2791 | http://www.crustytoothpaste.net/~bmc | My opinion only OpenPGP: RSA v4 4096b: 88AC E9B2 9196 305B A994 7552 F1BA 225C 0223 B187
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