Russ Allbery wrote:
> I was looking at your lintian patch in #347169 with an eye to applying it,
> but as near as I can tell, it's now unnecessary. Since you sent the
> patch, xlibs-dev has been included in obsolete packages, so that part is
> already done. The remaining section diagnoses dependencies on
> x-window-system and x-window-system-dev, but the latter is no longer in
> sid or etch and it looks like all dependencies are gone. We could still
> diagnose dependencies on the former, I suppose, but it doesn't look like
> anyone is currently making this mistake.
>
> Do you think that this test, or some reduced version of it, is still worth
> including in lintian?
It looks like at least one package (showeq) depends on
x-window-system-core (also not for use in Depends), and it could well
happen that someone might take the lazy-but-wrong approach and use the
other packages for dependencies in the future; thus, I think checking
for x-window-system{,-core,-dev} and "xorg" in the Depends and
Build-Depends fields couldn't hurt. (Note that Recommends or Suggests
on such a package does not cause a problem.)
Also, if you don't want to include this new type of check just for X, it
could probably generalize to a "nodep-packages" mechanism, for packages
which should not go in Depends or Build-Depends but could go in other
dependency fields unlike obsolete packages.
I checked the latest unstable lintian, and it looks like it also
includes the portion of this patch that addresses build-depends on
obsolete packages, so I think only the above issue remains relevant from
the patch.
Thanks,
Josh Triplett
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