Some coriousities about debian package maintaining

[Sebastian Müller <sebastian@messageme.de>]

Hi,

I didn?t practice my english for a while, I am sorry for misunderstandings.
If there are some points of misunderstanding, please ask me, that I am able
to solve them.
I am also a little unsure, if this is the correct place to ask, since I am
new to debian.

Today I installed a package via Apt (called ?tor?) on a server of mine. It
installed a few packages on my hdd, to name some of them: tor, privoxy,
socat, tsocks.
Privoxy started directly beeing a service running at boot, same goes for tor
itself.

Since I only wanted to use the package ?tor?, which was promoted on
https://www.torproject.org/, i removed privoxy, socat and tsocks.

After I did that, I am no longer able to use apt, it is telling me all the
time ?unmet depencies?, 
from my log:


debian:/etc/tor# apt-get upgrade
Paketlisten werden gelesen... Fertig
Abhängigkeitsbaum wird aufgebaut
Lese Status-Informationen ein... Fertig
Probieren Sie »apt-get -f install«, um dies zu korrigieren.
Die folgenden Pakete haben nicht erfüllte Abhängigkeiten:
  tor: Hängt ab: tsocks ist aber nicht installiert
       Empfiehlt: privoxy ist aber nicht installiert oder
                  polipo (>= 1) ist aber nicht installiert
       Empfiehlt: socat ist aber nicht installiert
E: Nicht erfüllte Abhängigkeiten. Versuchen Sie, -f zu benutzen.

As result, I opened a bugreport. Since I weren?t able to install ?reportbug?
(due to the failure about the depencies), I also took a look at Tor IRC. A
user in #Tor told me to write a bug report, since the packages should be
?suggested? instead of ?required?.

So, I wrote a bugreport by Mail.
(http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=539881 )

As you can read the response has been nearly the same like: 
?You are talking shit, they are not depencies?
Closed.

Nevertheless, when I install Tor (apt-get install tor), the depencies are
installed and Apt is morrowing when I deinstall them.
I talked to the maintainer in chat, but there is no way to get a normal
answer.
His answers were:

CRAZyBUg? oh yeah this bug sucks, after removing unneeded depencies, apt
stopped working saying 'privoxy, tsocks, socat needed by tor but not
installed'
weasel? it'll be closed immediatelhy.
weasel? so don't bother filing it
weasel? because tsocks is 500 kilobytes.
weasel? unpacked.
weasel? the .deb is half that
weasel? and the ftp masters would bite off my head for creating a package
for a single file
weasel? the meta data overhead and the maintenance and cpu overhead that
goes with that would never justify itself
weasel? moving out torify is one thing, but moving out tor-resolve and
tor-gencert adds another 11 or so packages
weasel? and I don't see the gain at all
weasel? also, there's little point
CRAZyBUg? Sebastian_: i don't care how big or small the app is. It is
unneeded and it's like installing some FTP server while using apt-get
install firefox
weasel? bullshit.
weasel? tsocks isn't a daemon.
CRAZyBUg? tsocks is unneeded for running tor, am i right, weasel?
weasel? it's needed for torify which is part of tor.
weasel? anyway, you are unlikely to change my opinion here. and you didn't
even do us the courtesy of reading backlog and instead just chose to steal
my time again
weasel? so have a nice day. bye.


The thing about ?torify is part of tor? is right, but it is used only if
privoxy or something like is installed too on localhost. When you don?t need
privoxy/socat (due to use on a server), you don?t need torify. Due to that,
the tsocks depency is unneeded (like privoxy and socat).
But all of them are getting installed by hitting: apt-get install tor
Privoxy is a daemon running in background. WTF?

I am not able to talk to weasel, since he doesn?t want to talk to me
anymore, as you can read in the chatlines.
I were using freeBSD the last years, started using debian a few month ago.
My requirement for security starts by installing as few software (and
DAEMONS!!) as possible. 
It would be nice, if you could answer me if I am wrong using debian with
that requirement.
Nevertheless, weasel wasn?t able to answer me how to get apt-get working
without using tsocks. Maybe you are able to.
I don?t know how else to contact, so I hope you can help me out.

hopefully,
Sebastian Müller