Re: Depends on -dev package
"Bernhard R. Link" <brlink@debian.org> writes:
> I think this is the old general discussion what "useful" is. A pdf
> viewer is not useful without a pdf file to view, still a pdf viewer
> should of course not depend on some package with pdf files in it.
> I think some good heuristic is usually looking at what you need and if
> it is needed anyway in the process of using something. If you compile a
> program, you will usually need libc development files anyway, so having
> them around is not really a new requirement (just like having a
> compiler). There is also not really a way to express what you need, as
> there are so many of them, you either need libc6-dv or libc0.1-dev or
> libc0.3-dev or libc6.1-dev or perhaps of the multilib files and so on.
> So not being able to express what you need and missing a realistic use
> case where only using this -dev package introduces the requirement, I
> think it is rather clear that this dependency is not needed.
I agree with your line of reasoning, but I'd rather be explicit about such
things rather than relying on everyone separately coming to the same
conclusion. (My inclination would be to write an explicit exception into
Policy saying that C -dev packages do not have to declare dependencies on
any package that's part of build-essential.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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