Bug#254367: lintian: spurious warning when only virtual package specified in Suggests
Package: lintian
Version: 1.23.0
Severity: minor
Hi,
As of the latest release, Lintian gives a warning on my package
(wmakerconf) that I consider to be spurious:
W: wmakerconf: virtual-package-depends-without-real-package-depends suggests: www-browser
N:
N: The package declares a depends on a virtual package without listing a
N: real package as an alternative first.
[snipped]
No package management programs that "can't or won't guess which alternative
to select by default" are smart enough to do anything with Suggests fields
in the control file. Lintian ought to report this warning only for Depends
and (maybe) Recommends.
The output of "grep-available -F Suggests www-browser | grep \^Suggests:"
shows that many other packages Suggest www-browser without providing a real
package as a prior alternative. More specifically:
$ grep-available -F Suggests www-browser | grep \^Suggests | egrep -v '\|[[:space:]]*www-browser' | wc -l
71
-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing')
Architecture: powerpc (ppc)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.6-powerpc
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
Versions of packages lintian depends on:
ii binutils 2.14.90.0.7-8 The GNU assembler, linker and bina
ii diffstat 1.34-1 produces graph of changes introduc
ii file 4.09-1 Determines file type using "magic"
ii man-db 2.4.2-16 The on-line manual pager
ii perl 5.8.4-2 Larry Wall's Practical Extraction
-- no debconf information
regards,
--
Kevin B. McCarty <kmccarty@princeton.edu> Physics Department
WWW: http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/ Princeton University
GPG: public key ID 4F83C751 Princeton, NJ 08544
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