self-depending packages

[Nicolas Boullis <nboullis@debian.org>]

Hi,

Trying to upgrade a woody system to sarge, I experienced problems 
upgrading libgtk2.0-0, and discovered that this packages was 
self-depending. Afetr forcing the upgrade with "dpkg -i --force-depends", 
everything went smoothly. So I filed a bug against libgtk2.0-0.
Then I discovered that I could upgrade this package from woody to sarge 
with no trouble in a clean pbuilder chroot. So the problem might me more 
complex.

However, from this bug report began a discussion with Loic Minier about 
self-dependencies and circular dependencies.

Readibg policy 7.2, I see:
"
Depends
    This declares an absolute dependency. A package will not be 
    configured unless all of the packages listed in its Depends field 
    have been correctly configured.
"

My understanding is that a self-depending package must be configured 
before it can be configured, which makes it unconfigurable, and hence 
uninstallable. And I think the same reasoning can be applied to 
circular dependencies. But Loic disagrees.

What is the opinion of others? Shouldn't policy be more explicit about 
circular (and self) dependencies?


Moreover, I just wrote a small python script that looks for 
self-dependencies in sarge, and found those packages:
libtabe2
libtextwrap1
gnustep-back
libbonoboui2-0
libgail-common
libbonobo2
libgtk2.0-0

Should a bug be filed against those packages?


Cheers,

Nicolas


PS: please CC your replies to me, as I am currently quite unable to 
track debian-devel. (MFT set accordingly)