Bug#626476: lintian: reduce dpkg-dev to Suggests
On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 08:51:36AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> 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.
Hmm. I kicked this around with some of my team. Here are a few
alternatives, all a bit grotty in one way or another:
* Split lintian into two binary packages, one of which only supports
checking binary packages, and the other of which (still called
'lintian') supports everything and depends on the first.
* Reimplement the small number of checks we consider for this use case
in aptdaemon or somewhere else.
* Split out dpkg-source from dpkg-dev.
* Observe that we already document how to unpack source packages
without dpkg-dev for users of non-Debian systems (in
/usr/share/doc/debian/source-unpack.txt - it currently only documents
format 1.0, but I attached a patch to #579263 some time ago that
updates this to 3.0), and that therefore this is an interface that
it's not necessarily too dreadful to reimplement as long as it's
strictly as a fallback for the case where dpkg-source is not present.
Perhaps oddly, I think the last of those actually strikes me as the
least bad solution, although only because the method is already
documented (modulo that bug report).
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@ubuntu.com]
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