Re: Depends/Recommends from libraries

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

On Tue, 2017-03-21 at 12:36:16 +0000, Ian Jackson wrote:
> Russ Allbery writes ("Re: Depends/Recommends from libraries"):
> > I think this would be a great way of introducing spurious bugs in our
> > distribution from [developers] who don't happen to read the README
> > file and miss dependencies they actually need because they're used
> > to Debian properly picking up shared library dependencies and to the
> > dependencies of any given package being fully self-contained.  Both
> > of which, I should add, are major *features* of our distribution
> > that many of us have worked very hard to achieve.  I'm opposed.
> > 
> > Now, if this were taken a further step so that dpkg-shlibdeps would
> > provide some mechanism to *automatically* add those downstream
> > dependencies to packages that depend on the library unless the
> > dependencies were explicitly suppressed, I wouldn't be as strongly
> > opposed.
> 
> This seems doable to me.

I don't think it's a matter of being doable or not, it certainly is.
I think it's a matter of whether this is correct or not. I think it
might be in extremely few cases, but in most it would be outright
wrong.

What this will end up doing is pushing dependencies for implementation
details towards far away transitive dependencies.

Whenever those implementation details change all those other packages
will need to be rebuilt, although this would still does not solve
artial upgrades.

> >  It still feels like needless complexity to me,
> 
> Others have explained why this is a real problem.

I think in many cases those problems can be solved in other ways, of
course that might imply work, but they are still solvable in better
ways.

Thanks,
Guillem