Re: Bug#443769: rt2500-source: Missing dependency on bzip2

[Romain Beauxis <toots@rastageeks.org>]

Le Tuesday 25 September 2007 17:37:03 Patrick Schoenfeld, vous avez écrit :
> Romain Beauxis schrieb:
> > Well the real solution to solve this is to count the ratio of packages
> > that provides sources as a bzip2 tarball with regard to gzip tarballs.
>
> Why do you call it the *real* solution? What makes the solution better
> over the one I suggested?

Well real is perhaps too strong.
Let's say that it's the quantitative approach. Other approaches are just 
chatty chatty.

There's no point in discussing infinitely things if we don't consider real 
facts.

This is no big deal, a quick an dirty search gives:
apt-file search /usr/src/ | grep gz | grep 'source:' | wc -l
 18
apt-file search /usr/src/ | grep  bz2 | grep 'source:' | wc -l
 48

(This search is not adequate, it matches non-module packages like 
ocaml-search)

So that makes roughtly 75% of bzip2 tarballs and 25 % of gz tarballs.
That number would mean to me that it is more likely to have a recommends than 
a depends.

Now perhaps, the real (...) solution is to settle a minimal policy about this.
For instance, should module-source package also depends on module-assistant ? 
This is the case for many packages but I don't think module-assistant is 
required to build a package, isn't it an *assistant* ?

A simple policy like "source packages must recommend module-assistant and 
should provide gzip tarballs" would give a common answer, given that it's not 
a technical issue as far as I see it...

Romain