Bug#388042: lintian: php-script-but-no-php-cli-dep broken?

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

merge 388042 387845
thanks

Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net> writes:

> Package: lintian
> Version: 1.23.24
> Severity: normal

> I get things like this

> E: egroupware-core: php-script-but-no-php-cli-dep 
> ../usr/share/egroupware/phpgwapi/js/htmlarea/plugins/merge_langs
> [... and more ...]

> But the dependency is right there:

> Package: egroupware-core
> Architecture: all
> Depends: apache2 | apache (>=1.3.29.0.1) | apache-ssl (>=1.3.29.0.1) | apache-perl (>=1.3.29.0.1),
>  libapache2-mod-php4 (>=4:4.1) | libapache-mod-php4 (>=4:4.1) | libapache2-mod-php5 | libapache-mod-php5,
>  php4-cli (>=4:4.3.4-1) | php5-cli,
>  php4-pgsql | php4-mysql | php5-pgsql | php5-mysql | php5-odbc | php4-odbc,
>  php-fpdf (>= 1.53.dfsg-3), php4-gd | php5-gd, php-log, php-pear,
>  perl,
>  ${misc:Depends}

Yeah, the current dependency code doesn't deal well with alternatives;
it's not smart enough to realize that a dependency of php4-cli | php5-cli
always satisfies a requirement of php4-cli | php5-cli because it explores
each branch separately.  There's a workaround in Subversion that will be
in the next upload.

Thanks for the report, and sorry about that.

> At about the same time I started getting complaints about a missing
> build dependency on po-debconf, which was never necessary because
> debhelper depends on it, so maybe the dependency parsing code is broken
> in general.

This, though, is correct.  If you use po-debconf as part of your build
process, you should depend on it directly and not rely on transitive
dependencies to satisfy your package requirement.  There's no guarantee
that debhelper will always depend on po-debconf in the future, so unless
you depend on it directly there's a possible lurking RC bug there should
debhelper ever change.  (Not to mention that it makes automated analysis
easier.)

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>