Re: Problem while checking for php-cli

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Thomas Goirand <thomas@goirand.fr> writes:

> It's warning about php-cli not being in the dependencies when IT IS
> present. In fact, I have php5-cli | php-cli | php4-cli (just to make
> sure this will work on all flavours of Debian).

That's the problem -- neither php4-cli nor php-cli are recognized ways to
fulfill a PHP requirement because neither package appears in unstable,
which means that your package doesn't have a sufficiently strong
dependency as far as Lintian is concerned to be sure that the interpreter
you're using is actually installed.

Hm.  The current infrastructure in Lintian doesn't have a way of allowing
one to add additional unnecessarily alternatives that won't *break*
anything in unstable.  Neither did the infrastructure in previous
versions; what happened was that in the process of fixing Lintian's
inability to realize that depending solely on php4-cli was a problem,
depending on php5-cli | php4-cli became not sufficient either.

If I were you I'd just depend on php5-cli and be done with it.  The
package is for Debian unstable after all and one can always change the
dependencies in a backport for other versions of Debian.  A more general
solution for this is going to be hard, since the goal is to not permit
things like php5-cli | perl and it simplifies Lintian drastically to be
able to reason from dependency implications.

So far as I can tell, no such package as php-cli has ever existed,
although maybe it's a defunct provides that predates oldstable.  php5-cli
does not provide php-cli and neither did php4-cli in sarge.  What problem
were you solving by including php-cli?

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