Bug#626476: lintian: reduce dpkg-dev to Suggests
Colin Watson <cjwatson@ubuntu.com> writes:
> We're shipping lintian on Ubuntu CD images as a Recommends of aptdaemon,
> in order to do some basic sanity checks on third-party binary packages.
> Unfortunately this pulls in dpkg-dev and its dependencies, which are
> rather heavyweight. Some analysis shows that the only thing that we
> need dpkg-dev for is to unpack source packages, so it's possible to
> check binary packages without dpkg-dev.
> The attached patch checks whether dpkg-source is available and produces
> a better error message; it then drops dpkg-dev to a Suggests so that we
> don't have to ship it. I don't think this should particularly
> negatively affect anyone - if you're building packages, you have
> dpkg-dev installed anyway, and probably not solely by means of
> installing lintian - but I thought I'd file a bug about it rather than
> just committing it so that we could discuss it in case anyone had any
> objections.
Hurm. I have to admit that this doesn't make me particularly happy, since
checking source packages seems like a fundamental action of Lintian. The
use of dpkg-dev in Lintian seems to meet the Policy definition of at
*least* Recommends fairly clearly, and Suggests feels much too weak when
we lose that basic of functionality.
On the other hand, I have no alternative solution to your particular
problem; the Recommends list of dpkg-dev is indeed rather heavy, since it
includes build-essential.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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