Re: emacs mode for running debuild, debc, and debi etc.

[Rob Browning <rlb@defaultvalue.org>]

Peter S Galbraith <p.galbraith@globetrotter.net> writes:

> Well, usually we byte-compile elisp files for all emacs flavours, and we
> need to depend on emacsen-common for that.  If you omit that, then no,
> you don't need to depend on it.

Packages aren't supposed to depend on emacsen-common directly.  At
least not according to current policy:

  /usr/share/doc/emacsen-common/debian-emacs-policy.gz

  D) Each add-on package must declare relevant dependencies on other
     packages (including other add-on packages).  Note that add-on
     packages should not depend on emacsen-common directly, but rather
     on either the virtual package "emacsen" (see below), or some
     appropriate combination of flavors (i.e. Depends: emacs21 |
     emacs10).  In addition, any tools needed by the install/remove
     scripts must be listed as package dependencies.  For example,
     many add-on packages will probably use make in the install
     script, so they need to add "Depends: make" to their control
     file.  emacsen-common will make sure that the install/remove
     scripts are ordered to respect inter-add-on package dependencies.

I'm not absolutely sure we can't relax this requirement, but I tried
to be pretty careful when I wrote the original policy, and I wrote it
while I was creating the emacsen-common infrastructure, so there's a
non-trivial chance that I specified this to avoid some sequencing
error or other dependency-related dark corner.  (I wish I had added a
Rationale section here :/)

If it's a big deal, then I can see about reviewing the code/policy to
check if it might be OK to allow add-on packages to depend on
emacsen-common directly.  For now, I'd continue to recommend against
that.

-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org, @linuxdevel.com, and @debian.org
Previously @cs.utexas.edu
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