Depends generated by maintainer scripts

[Gopal Narayanan <gopal@fcrao1.phast.umass.edu>]

I am packaging an install wrapper package for the SETI@Home client. I
have a question about dependencies caused by maintainer scripts.

The client binary is to be downloaded as a tarball from the official
SETI@Home webpage. At the official webpage, they have optimized
binaries for i686 machines or i386 machines. I would like to automate
the process of getting the binary from the official site.  I have that
working using wget in the postinst script. However that means that
setiathome has to be made dependent on wget. At a later point of time,
if the user wants to remove wget, he/she would have to remove
setiathome first or use dpkg exceptions to remove wget. Either way,
this does not seem right, since setiathome does not actually depend on
wget for its operation, only for its installation.

The policy does not have much to say about dependencies on maintainer
scripts. Any suggestions? Is this a question for the -policy list?
Time for a field called Install-Depends in package fields(only joking here)? 

Or is there a package with priority "required" or "important" that can do
the same sort of url-getting that "optional" package wget does?

Thanks in advance
Gopal


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Gopal Narayanan                          Ph #: (413) 545 0925
Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory Fax#: (413) 545 4223
University of Massachusetts              e-mail: gopal@fcrao1.phast.umass.edu
Amherst MA 01003
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