Re: change proposal for handling of Depends: field in task files

[Ole Streicher <olebole@debian.org>]

Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com> writes:
> We started by using depends.  This proved a disaster, as the meta
> packages would be close to impossible to keep in testing.  It would be
> thrown out or blocked from entering testing whenever any of the more
> than 1000 packages we want had a RC problem.
>
> After struggling with this for a few years, we decided to use recommends
> instead.

The problem here is IMO that the task still says "Depends", which is
translated into "Recommends": this is just not intuitive. And it
requires that a task that has a strong real "Depends" needs to do some
workarounds.

The number of blends is countable: I personally like the idea to first
replace all "Depends" with "Recommends" in all tasks files, and then
change the behaviour of the "blends-dev" package.

We should also introduce a format identifier to make future changes
easier; so my proposal would be:

1. We write a (maybe preliminary) format description and publish it
under a well-defined URL

2. We create bugs for all known build-dependencies of blends-dev to
2.1 'sed s/^Depends:/Recommends:/ -i tasks/*`
2.2 insert a "Format: https://blends.d.o/format"; as first line to
    indicate that the new format is used

3. Once all switched (should be not that difficult, due to the
 straightforward change), we upload a new version of blends-dev that
 checks the format id and
 a) either exits with error if it is not there or a wrong one
 b) prints a depretation warning and proceeds with the old style in that
    case
 Because of the trivial change, I would prefer a).

Best regards

Ole