Re: Bug#13849: netstd should predepend on libreadlineg2

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

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Peter Tobias:
> Santiago Vila:
> > These are the current Dependencies and Pre-Dependencies:
> > 
> > Depends: cpp, libc6, libreadlineg2 (>= 2.1-4), ncurses3.4
> > Pre-Depends: netbase (>= 3.00)
> > 
> > If you take a pure bo system, install netbase, and then install netstd,
> > all netstd binaries will stop working.
> 
> Why do they stop working? libreadlineg2 is only used by the ftp client.
> I don't see why a pre-depends would be better than a normal depends for
> libreadlineg2.

Well, they certainly will stop working because they are linked
against libc6 and libc6 is not installed yet (remember, we are doing this
in a pure bo system).

The fact is that I upgraded netstd before installing libreadlineg2 and I
managed to mess up the ftp client. This is very bad even if dselect uses
perl to do the FTP thing. It is always desirable to have alternate methods
to recover from disasters (like the simple ftp client and dpkg on the
command line).

Jason Gunthorpe:
> making libreadline a pre-depend is pointless because the package could
> still break without libc6.

Well, then it should Pre-Depend on libc6 and ncurses3.4 also.

> [...] all depends must be converted to pre-depends, converting some
> doesn't do much at all.

I don't know if you are referring here to netstd or to all packages.

netstd is a really important package because it contains the simple ftp 
client and most people can not afford to leave it in a non-working state.
Is this not enough for a Pre-Depend?

So, yes, maybe all depends in netstd should be really Pre-Depends, or at
least all dependencies on shared libraries.



Please, tell me how much harm does to add a Pre-Depends field.
I can tell you how much inconvenience does not to add it and then we can
compare.

Thanks.

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