Re: Spliting packages between pkg and pkg-data

[Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de>]

Thijs Kinkhorst <kink@squirrelmail.org> writes:

> On Mon, 2005-11-21 at 16:26 +0100, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
>> foo depends on foo-data. But foo-data does NOT depend on foo.
>> 
>> So an "apt-get install foo-data", while being useless, is consistent
>> for dpkg. After that you would end up with a menu entry for foo but no
>> foo binary.
>
> If package foo-data is useless when foo is not installed, foo-data
> should depend on package foo. This follows from policy manual 7.2: "The
> Depends field should be used if the depended-on package is required for
> the depending package to provide a significant amount of
> functionality.". Or am I missing something here?
>
> Thijs

What functionality does the foo-data package loose if you purge foo?
Does "less /usr/share/foo/textfile" or "qiv /usr/share/foo/image"
suddenly stop working?

On the other hand, what functionality does foo loose if foo-data is
missing?

You can't have both depending on the other without causing a depends
loop, which is bad and easily causes install/purge failures. Think
about which dependency ensures a working binary to the user and which
only means the installation makes sense.

MfG
        Goswin