The distinction between optional and extra is commonly ignored and yet debcheck continues to add reports to the PTS about packages which have dependencies which crossover from optional into extra. Do we care about any distinction between optional and extra any longer? From previous conversations with some members of the ftp team, it seems to be regarded as either irrelevant or historical legacy. Is it in any way relevant to how Debian is installed, maintained or used? If not, can we remove this feature from debcheck? Personally, I can't see that it's worth "fixing" the actual priorities of packages which are priority optional but have dependencies on packages which are priority extra. So shouldn't debcheck just not report these "issues" any longer? Other priorities are probably worth checking but IMHO optional and extra may as well be considered as a single set within debcheck. There's also the issue of debcheck handling of Arch:all packages which depend on architecture-dependent packages with a limited set of architectures. It isn't helpful for the PTS to have "issues" reported about an Arch:all package on non-linux ports depending on a package which is only available on linux:any. It seems that debcheck is taking a very simplistic view of that and should really only report if an architecture-dependent package depends on a package which is not available on the same arch. A QA nag tool which is so commonly ignored is possibly not even worth running. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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