"Manoj Srivastava" <srivasta@debian.org> wrote in message [🔎] 87mzb2hhji.fsf@glaurung.internal.golden-gryphon.com">news:[🔎] 87mzb2hhji.fsf@glaurung.internal.golden-gryphon.com...
In the sense that you are abusing the terms of policy. It is true that dpkg will install and configure with circular dependecies, but Policy states "A package will not be configured unless all of the packages listed in its Depends field have been correctly configured."On Fri, 21 Jul 2006 15:09:56 -0400, Joe Smith <unknown_kev_cat@hotmail.com> said:Well, strictly speaking all circular dependencies could be considered a policy violation because they depend on dpkg not working as policy states it does.Could you elaborate on this? manoj
Clearly if dpkg really enforeced that, no circular dependecy would ever work as the packages would be installed, but could not be configured because a depencency was not configured.
Depending on a package not acting in the manner in which policy states it will could be considered a type of policy violation.
Granted it would not be sensical to report this as a bug on dpkg because it is simply going beyond what policy states it will do. I would say that no package is directly violating policy, but ther packages are abusing policy. In one sense policy itself is the buggy package because it asserts something that is not true.
Then again, that section of policy looks a bit dated anyway, mentioning "dselect" despite the fact that that package is now all but completely obsoleted by apt and the various apt-frontends.