Re: Bug#774844: xfonts-traditional: fails to upgrade from 'wheezy': Can't locate File/Find.pm in @INC
Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:
> But it mostly occurs when a dependency is indirected through an
> intermediate package. That is, A uses some feature in C, but the
> dependency is declared on B which depends on C.
> This is (perhaps surprisingly) not particularly common.
That's partly because those of us who work on Lintian have been annoying
maintainers about this as much as possible to try to get them not to do
that. :)
> But in the case of perl it's nearly universal, because of the policy
> recommendation to depend on the metapackage `perl' rather than perl-base
> or perl-modules.
I suspect this is an outgrowth of the fact that we've always felt that the
split of the perl package was sort of "wrong," in the sense that we did it
for internal reasons that are valid, but the average user should not
perceive it as being divided into multiple packages, and we generally
should try to avoid treating it as such.
> I don't think `requires strict dependencies' is a very useful concept
> here. That xfonts-traditional uses (in a maintainer script) a perl
> module which has always been implied by `perl' can hardly be unusual. I
> don't think it makes sense to regard that as a particularly `strict'.
There are certainly other packages in the archive with Perl maintainer
scripts, although the ones I'm aware of I don't think use modules that
have moved.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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