Hi there!
Given that I found this problem for the second time in the last 4
months, I think this is worth a discussion on debian-devel@.
It seems that recently two library packages started to change their
Recommends: to common data to a Depends:. This after two bugs were
reported by the same person, Josh Triplett (cc:ed, sorry for the spam),
who asked for an explanation for the Recommends: (a reason which I find
perfectly valid). The two bugs are:
<http://bugs.debian.org/599643>
<http://bugs.debian.org/599666>
When I found out about libm17n-0, I also found out that the change added
a circular dependency and thus commented on this new bug why I think a
library package should not depend on data packages:
<http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=604926#20>
And now, while looking again for that bug to be linked here, I found
another occurrence of such a situation, reported almost one year ago [1]
by Axel Beckert (cc:ed as well, again sorry for the spam):
<http://bugs.debian.org/582797>
[1] I remember that during one upgrade of emacs-snapshot I was surprised
it pulled anthy-common, but then forgot about reporting it...
I see these situations as a misuse of Depends: where Recommends: would
be perfectly fine, otherwise Recommends: are useless. But given that it
seems no one agrees with me, is such a behavior documented somewhere?
Thx, bye,
Gismo / Luca
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