Re: Accepted sdm 0.4.1-2 (source all)

[Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant@freegeek.org>]

On Sat, Jun 26, 2010 at 02:40:37PM +0100, Julien Cristau wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 26, 2010 at 12:57:45 +0000, Vagrant Cascadian wrote:
> 
> >  sdm (0.4.1-2) unstable; urgency=low
> >  .
> [...]
> >    * No longer include dash as a dependency; it is included in essential.
> >    * Add lintian overrides for missing-dep-for-interpreter dash, as dash
> >      is now essential.
> 
> My understanding was that dash was only in the Essential set as the
> default provider of /bin/sh, and that /bin/dash was explicitly *not*
> guaranteed to stay in Essential, and thus packages using that need to
> keep their dependencies.  Did I misunderstand, or is the above change
> wrong?

well, lintian warns either way you do it, hence the override:

  http://bugs.debian.org/587209

some clarity on how to handle that would be nice, yes.  since dash *is* marked
essential, and based on my reading of policy 3.8:

    "Maintainers should take great care in adding any programs, interfaces, or
    functionality to `essential' packages.  Packages may assume that
    functionality provided by `essential' packages is always available without
    declaring explicit dependencies, which means that removing functionality
    from the Essential set is very difficult and is almost never done.  Any
    capability added to an `essential' package therefore creates an obligation
    to support that capability as part of the Essential set in perpetuity."

seemed like the override was the appropriate thing to do, but i'm not terribly
attached if it's deemed better to handle it differently.

live well,
  vagrant