Re: Undeclared dependencies on tzdata

[Guillem Jover <gjover@sipwise.com>]

On Mon, Nov 21, 2022 at 21:32:37 +0800, Shengjing Zhu wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 21, 2022 at 9:07 PM Santiago Vila <sanvila@debian.org> wrote:
> > El 21/11/22 a las 3:19, Shengjing Zhu escribió:
> > > tzdata's priority is required. Is this an effort to make tzdata optional?
> >
> > Being "priority: required", being "essential: yes", and being
> > build-essential are all three different things.
> >
> > My intent is to keep stable free from FTBFS bugs, i.e. packages which do
> > not follow this paragraph in policy:
> >
> > "If build-time dependencies are specified, it must be possible to build
> > the package and produce working binaries on a system with only essential
> > and build-essential packages installed and also those required to
> > satisfy the build-time relationships (including any implied relationships)."

> So I think we have different interpretations for the policy.

I think Debian policy is rather clear here TBH.

> > As you suggest, maybe it would help if debootstrap did not install
> > tzdata in the buildd profile (maybe I will file another bug for that),
> > but this is completely orthogonal to my original aim, which is to have
> > those bugs fixed in stable. That's why I asked for advice about the best
> > way to achieve that. Can we continue on the go-pkg list?

> I think it should be on debian-devel.

> And if the consensus is that required packages should be explicit set
> at build-depends.

Personally I don't think this is needed. But…

> We should ensure buildd doesn't include them.
> Otherwise we can only fix the packages you have listed today. More
> packages may miss it tomorrow.

…this seems (in addition, and not in contrast) also like something
that we should be doing, but does not contradict that missing
build-dependencies on tzdata are bugs.

For context, historically prio:required packages have matched packages
in the essential-set, and it has been a cheap way (a workaround really)
for dumb tools like debootstrap to be able to pull that set w/o having
to construct a dependency graph. I think though, debootstrap is a bit
smarter now and can handle pulling the needed packages even if they
are not prio:required, as libraries got their priority lowered recently.

So it seems to me we have a bunch of packages that are prio:required
but not Essential (some have switched to Protected:yes), that should
get their priority lowered to (at least to) important:

  debconf
  e2fsprogs
  libpam-modules
  libpam-modules-bin
  libpam-runtime
  mount
  passwd
  tzdata

So, someone should probably file a bug report against ftp.debian.org
to get the overrides updated.

Thanks,
Guillem