Question regarding package dependance

[Stefanos Harhalakis <v13@v13.gr>]

Dear mentors,

  I've come up to a situation that I'm not sure how to handle. A package that 
I created and packaged, named 'vbackup', is included in debian unstable [1] 
under the sponsoring of Vincent Bernat (hi Vincent). After getting it from 
the unstable repository I realised that it doesn't work as expected. vbackup 
is a set of shell scripts that use external programs like mdadm, xfsdump, 
tar, etc to perform backups. Since it uses a number of programs that may not 
be already installed I made the configure script auto-detect them.

  For debian I declare those packages as suggested:

Suggests: xfsdump, mdadm, lvm2, postgresql-client, mysql-client, rpm

  I did this because there is no need to force a user to have postgresql, 
mysql, mdadm, etc installed when they're not used. It seems that the debian 
builder builds this package without providing the 'suggested' packages as 
well. This makes the configure script to fail to detect the proper paths of 
mdadm, psql, mysql, rpm, etc. Since those paths as stored inside a 
compile-time generated script (common.sh) those paths stay empty.

  I find the configure program detection very convenient since it allows 
vbackup to be run under other OSes like IRIX where the gnu tar is installed 
in a different location (which is specified by a --with-tar=... parameter to 
configure).

  So what do you suggest to do with it? I currently consider the following as 
possible solutions:
a) Make the detection run-time (not good)
b) Add run-time detection when configure-time detection failed (Working on 
this)
c) Add a configuration file to hold program locations (Bad - I don't like 
asking for configuration that can be automated)
d) Make other programs a "Depends" instead of "Suggests" (Not a good idea. 
Right?)
e) Fill a bug report asking that the builder (pbuild?) also include 
the "Suggests" packages when making a package
f) Add all 'Suggests' packages as Build-Depends too (is it a good idea? 
${Suggests} ?)

  Also, how can I force vbackup to stay in unstable even after lenny is 
released when such bugs are found? (It makes the package mostly unusable). Is 
there a relevant how to? I've looked in maintainer's guide and in developer's 
reference but I didn't find anything related.

[1] http://packages.qa.debian.org/v/vbackup.html