Russ Allbery wrote:
> Josh Triplett <josh@freedesktop.org> writes:
>> It looks like at least one package (showeq) depends on
>> x-window-system-core (also not for use in Depends),
>
> The description of x-window-system-core explicitly says it's for use in
> Depends, actually. It does say that it's for use in Depends for
> meta-packages, but right now lintian doesn't really draw that
> distinction.
Given that for 99.9% of packages it would constitute a bug to Depends:
x-window-system-core, you could add it and just let metapackages add
lintian overrides. That would catch the showeq case. On the other
hand, that seems highly suboptimal. In the absence of a better way to
check metapackages differently, this should probably remain unchecked.
(In any case, showeq looks horribly broken in various other ways; the
last upload occurred in 2004 and built with gcc-3.3, against libraries
which don't exist in unstable or testing anymore. I've filed a grave
bug on it, along with a normal bug for the x-window-system-core issue.)
>> 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.)
>
> Yeah, I was thinking about doing at least that much, but I couldn't figure
> out a good way around the meta-package depending on another meta-package
> thing. Build-Depends is a bit more straightforward.
Well, at a minimum, Depends or Build-Depends on x-window-system,
x-window-system-dev, or xorg will always constitute a bug. Adding those
would help somewhat.
- Josh Triplett
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