Raphael Hertzog wrote: > On Fri, 22 Feb 2008, Mike Bird wrote: >> Raphael, >> >> What please is the benefit of unnecessarily reordering dependencies >> and leaving everyone on tenterhooks as to whether it will change >> installation outcomes? (If this has already been explained I apologize >> for overlooking it.) > > 1/ Sorting makes the output deterministic, and this means that (potential) > problems are more likely to be reproduced by everybody (whatever the > architecture, etc.) > 2/ debdiff uses wdiff to show changes on field values and wdiff gives > spurious differences if the sole difference between both values is > a different order. Thus debdiff output is more useful with ordered Depends > fields. Ironically, the reason I just noticed yesterday that dpkg-deb (?) had been changed to re-order Depends recently is that I was trying to do a debdiff between mn-fit versions 5.13-5 (just uploaded to experimental) and 5.13-4 (uploaded back in 2006). As one might imagine, the new re-ordering wasn't that helpful in seeing what dependencies had changed between the two uploads :-) best regards, -- Kevin B. McCarty <kmccarty@gmail.com> WWW: http://www.starplot.org/ WWW: http://people.debian.org/~kmccarty/ GPG: public key ID 4F83C751
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