Re: RFC: relaxation of debian-emacs-policy dependency requirements

[Rob Browning <rlb@defaultvalue.org>]

Agustin Martin <agmartin@debian.org> writes:

> On Tue, Jul 06, 2010 at 11:51:06AM +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:

>> Why should a package which happens to also ship some elisp need to
>> depend on any Emacs package at all ?  What will go wrong if the
>> package is installed without any Emacs ?
>
> Agreed.
>
> lisp stuff in a package whose main use is not Emacs should be used if
> an emacsen package is installed and ignored otherwise. There is nothing wrong
> with that. Even if /var/lib/emacsen-common/installed-flavors was not
> originally designed for that, seems a good way to know if emacsen-common is
> configured, so a prerm snippet like
>
> if [ -x /usr/lib/emacsen-common/emacs-package-remove ] && 
>    [ -e /var/lib/emacsen-common/installed-flavors ]; then
>     /usr/lib/emacsen-common/emacs-package-remove #PACKAGE#
> fi

I'd rather not handle it this way.  If we do relax the policy
requirement, I'd rather abstract this a bit more, so that add-on
packages don't directly depend on a detail of the current
implementation, and commit emacsen-common to the maintenance of
installed-flavors indefinitely.

Thanks
-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org
GPG as of 2002-11-03 14DD 432F AE39 534D B592 F9A0 25C8 D377 8C7E 73A4