Ivan Shmakov schrieb: > Since I've already started this thread, I'm going to ask for > opinions on the one more issue with the current (Etch, at least) > dependencies in Debian to bother me. > > Is `logrotate' really necessary for those 46 packages or so in > Etch to include it in their `Depends:'? > > Debian Policy reads: > > --cut: www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html-- > The Depends field should be used if the depended-on package is > required for the depending package to provide a significant amount > of functionality. > > The Depends field should also be used if the postinst, prerm or > postrm scripts require the package to be present in order to > run. Note, however, that the postrm cannot rely on any > non-essential packages to be present during the purge phase. > --cut: www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html-- > > My opinion is that since `logrotate' is not required neither for > the maintainer scripts in order to run, nor ``for the depending > package to provide a significant amount of functionality'', this > dependency should be either relaxed (to `Recommends:' or > `Suggests:') or discarded completely. Exactly. If any of the old, rather inflexible syslog implementations depended on logrotate, I would say that would be perfectly fine. But for applications (even if they write their logs themselves like apache or samba usually do), I would only expect a simple Recommends. On my servers, I'm forced to have logrotate installed due to applications like samba, even though I immediately disable logrotate after installation and use my own rotation scripts (for those applications not using syslog - syslog-ng in this case) instead. I do see the argument about a maintainer best making as sure as possible that a user doesn't run into problems unless he overrode the packages defaults. But in this sense, a Recommends is a package default, and the user should be expected to know what he does if he doesn't install Recommends. Given the example of Samba, logrotate isn't _needed_ to provide any amount of functionality of the software packaged and more specifically not needed to provide a _significant_ amount of functionality. Following this argument, one could even suggest that listing logrotate as a Depends is a policy violation (and as such release critical). The exception made for maintainer scripts doesn't fit here either, since the maintainer scripts don't use logrotate. I didn't check, but I would guess that the same is true for many of the other packages in Sid that depend on logrotate. So IMHO, most of those packages really should only Suggest logrotate. cu, Sven
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