Bug#626476: lintian: reduce dpkg-dev to Suggests

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@ubuntu.com>]

On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 07:05:17PM +0200, Niels Thykier wrote:
> On 2011-05-17 18:16, Colin Watson wrote:
> > On Sat, May 14, 2011 at 07:50:45PM +0200, Niels Thykier wrote:
> >> Functional proof-of-concept patch; simply apply and profit!  The code is
> >> stolen from dpkg-source and cooked down a bit (... a lot).
> >>
> >> The patch here disables dpkg-source unpacking all together (saves you
> >> from peeling out dpkg-dev from a system).
> > 
> > That's a bit further than what Raphaël said this API was OK for - not
> > just "a fallback when dpkg-source is not there".  Have you
> > double-checked that with him?
> 
> It was not my intention to apply this patch as is.  The argument for
> disabling the dpkg-source usage was to ease your job as a tester (so you
> did not have to uninstall dpkg-dev from your machines).

Ah, OK.  FWIW I was just temporarily moving /usr/bin/dpkg-source aside
in my earlier tests rather than trying to uninstall the package.

> >> The patch does not account for updating the Lintian Depends; I suspect
> >> that dpkg-dev should be replaced with bzip2, xz-utils and
> >> libdpkg-perl.  The former two can be most likely be left out if you
> >> know there are no bz2 / xz / lmza sources.
> > 
> > Or perhaps we can just rely on libdpkg-perl's Recommends of bzip2 and
> > xz-utils?
> 
> Possibly, I hope some of the other Lintian maintainers have a comment on
> this.  Should we just go with Depends: dpkg-dev | libdpkg-perl or do we
> want ...
> 
> Recommends: dpkg-dev
> Depends/Recommends: bzip2, xz-utils

Neither of those would help my use case, because it would have the
effect of dragging dpkg-dev into our CD images anyway (we install
Recommends by default just as Debian does, and our tools prefer the
first element in a dependency disjunction if it exists).

How about:

  Depends: libdpkg-perl, bzip2, xz-utils
  Suggests: dpkg-dev

or:

  Depends: libdpkg-perl
  [Recommends: bzip2, xz-utils]
  Suggests: dpkg-dev

(Recommends in brackets because libdpkg-perl already recommends those,
so I'm not sure if there's much point in lintian repeating this.)

> > This drops the signature check currently performed by dpkg-source, so it
> > changes Lintian's behaviour to (a) accept .dsc files with bad signatures
> > and (b) stop issuing a warning for unsigned .dsc files.  This seems
> > undesirable.
> > 
> > Aside from that, the patch does seem to work as advertised.  Thanks!
> 
> Actually as far as I can tell, we do not get any warnings on unsigned
> source packages (possibly due to the -q option), but sure, checking
> signatures should not be an issue either.

Oh, you're right, -q would suppress the warning for unsigned files.  I
think my point (a) is still true though.

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson@ubuntu.com]