Re: Bug#139185: dict-gcide: Build-Depends-Indep: dictd

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

Bob Hilliard wrote:
> Daniel Schepler <schepler@math.berkeley.edu> writes:
>
> > Package: dict-gcide
> > Version: 0.44-2
> > Severity: normal
> >
> > Without the dictzip program present in the dictd package, the
> > resulting package is much larger than if dictzip is available.
>
>      (Bug # 139189, against dict-wn, is identical to this report.)
>
>      I don't believe this is a bug.  If dictzip is available on the
> build system, the database is uncompressed; if it is not available the
> database is not compressed, but the resulting database is fully
> usable.  Policy Section 7.6 says:
>
>      A source package may declare a dependency or a conflict on a binary
>      package, indicating which packages are required to be present on the
>      system in order to build the binary packages from the source package.

It is commonly agreed that the contents of a binary package should not
change significatively because of other packages not in the build-depends
being present or missing at build time. If this is ever the case you should
add the relevant packages to build-depends or build-conflicts, so that
the build process yields always the same result.

This is what we have build-dependencies. There is no Build-Recommends.

In this case you should decide whether you want the dictionary in
the .deb binary package to be always compressed or never. Consider that your
package will be built for 10 other different architectures.