As Steve Langasek detailed in his d-d-a mail[1], unnecessary dependencies cause lots of problems, as they make transitions bigger then they need to be. The root cause are unnecessary libraries on the linker commandline, which get stored in the resulting binary and which dpkg-shlibdeps happily turns into inter-package dependencies. Thus the goal is to eliminate those unnecessary linker arguments. As a start, I've written a script that searches for unnecessary dependencies and reports them. Results are available here: http://rerun.lefant.net/checklib More detailed information about the meaning of the results are available on the web page, the two most important points are "problems" and "errors". A "problem" means that the package has useless dependencies on library packages. This causes the kind of trouble outlined above and should be fixed. A HOWTO is here: http://rerun.lefant.net/checklib/howto-fix-problems.html The other, even more important issue, are checklib "errors". They indicate that the package check failed. That's usually caused by deps on non-existing packages or missing dependencies. Both are (at least) important bugs in the package! A summary of the possible causes for errors and some hints for fixing them are here: http://rerun.lefant.net/checklib/howto-fix-errors.html Below is the dd-list output of packages which are missing dependencies, and where this can cause real problems (i.e. the package can be installed without pulling in all the necessary library packages). All the packages listed below have (not yet filed) serious bugs. If one of your packages is affected please fix it ASAP. Please take a look at the results for packages you are involved in, and try to fix the issues if you see "problems" or "errors". Cheers, Christian Aichinger [1]: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/11/msg00016.html Daniel Baumann <daniel@debian.org> lush Jay Bonci <jaybonci@debian.org> libxml-libxml-common-perl Marco Cabizza <marco87@gmail.com> libgnome-media0 Debian Hebrew Packaging Team <debian-hebrew-package@lists.alioth.debian.org> libhdate-perl libhdate-python libhocr-perl libhocr-python Debian Java Maintainers <pkg-java-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org> eclipse-jdt-gcj eclipse-pde-gcj eclipse-platform-gcj eclipse-rcp-gcj Patrick Dreker <patrick@dreker.org> python-pyxmpp Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd@debian.org> r-cran-fmultivar r-cran-fseries Peter Van Eynde <pvaneynd@debian.org> cmucl-clm Gustavo Franco <stratus@debian.org> python-notify David Moreno Garza <damog@debian.org> rxvt Debian QA Group <packages@qa.debian.org> rxvt-beta socketapi1 Christoph Haas <haas@debian.org> fyre Dafydd Harries <daf@debian.org> libjinglebase0.3-0 libjinglep2p0.3-0 libjinglesession0.3-0 libjinglexmllite0.3-0 libjinglexmpp0.3-0 Nobuhiro Iwamatsu <hemamu@t-base.ne.jp> libflash-mozplugin libflash-swfplayer Matthias Klose <doko@debian.org> python-pygresql tix Carlos Laviola <claviola@debian.org> fp-ide Chris Lawrence <lawrencc@debian.org> r-cran-bayesm Ricardo Javier Cardenes Medina <rcardenes@debian.org> python-kde3 Vittorio Palmisano <redclay81@gmail.com> python-matplotlib Michael Piefel <piefel@debian.org> python-magic Doug Rintoul <doug_rintoul@sil.org> kmflcomp Kevin M. Rosenberg <kmr@debian.org> ctsim ctsim-athlon ctsim-pentium4 Anibal Monsalve Salazar <anibal@debian.org> libgii1-target-x Joop Stakenborg <pa3aba@debian.org> libhamlib2 William Vera <billy@billy.com.mx> gsetroot
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature