Bug#585734: lintian: -dbg packages should recommend *or* depend on all binary packages

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Bernd Zeimetz <bzed@debian.org> writes:

> Currently lintian requires that -dbg packages depend on all packages
> they contain debug symbols for.

Lintian goes to some length to not require that.  It just requires that
they depend on at least one of the packages for which they provide
symbols, so that they can list all the packages using |.  That's the best
way to do it; that way, any of the packages satisfies the dependencies
(since the -dbg package really is useless without at least one of them).

N: dbg-package-missing-depends
N:
N:   The given binary package has a name of the form of "X-dbg", indicating
N:   it contains detached debugging symbols for the package X. If so, it
N:   should depend on the corresponding package, generally with (=
N:   ${binary:Version}) since the debugging symbols are only useful with
N:   the binaries created by the same build.
N:   
N:   If this package provides debugging symbols for multiple other
N:   packages, it should normally depend on all of those packages as
N:   alternatives. In other words, pkga (= ${binary:Version}) | pkgb (=
N:   ${binary:Version) and so forth.
N:   
N:   Severity: normal, Certainty: certain

> The reason for this is to avoid installing a lot of unnecessary packages
> if you just want to debug something in one of the packages. zbar is a
> good example for that: Imagine you want to debug an issue in libzbar0 on
> a server without X and you install zbar-dbg, which depends on all binary
> packages it contains debug symbols for.

I think that's just a bug in zbar-dbg and it should list the packages as
alternatives rather than as all requirements.

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