Bug#131347: lintian could check for -dev package dependencies
> Package: lintian
> Severity: wishlist
>
> There are many -dev packages which do not declare dependency on
> necessary -dev packages.
>
> It might be nice to issue warnings on lib*-dev packages which
> have Depends: line with no lib*-dev dependencies against
> those which are in Build-Depends.
Thinking about this for a bit, I don't think this is something that would
ever be useful to do, unfortunately.
This approach would make the assumption that any lib*-dev package required
to build a package containing a library should also be a dependency of the
development version of the library. Putting aside whether it's worth
keeping such a dependency only for static linking when the one library
completely hides the usage of the other, this fails for large packages
that produce multiple binary packages. Consider a package that builds a
library that depends on nothing but libc and a separate binary package of
executables that depend on both it and, say, LDAP libraries. The LDAP
-dev package will be in Build-Depends, but the library -dev package should
not depend on it.
Since Build-Depends is for the whole source package, not broken out by
resulting binary package, I think this idea is unfortunately unworkable.
If other lintian developers agree, I think this bug should probably just
be closed.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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