On Sat, Nov 17, 2001 at 12:24:20AM -0500, Joey Hess wrote:
> Branden Robinson wrote:
> > I think both should be forbidden.
> > ELF objects, minor or major, must declare shared library dependencies
> > as Depends.
> > ELF objects, minor or major, that link against non-free shared libraries
> > must not go into main.
> Why are ELF objects so special?
AFAICS, they're not, and the issue here is whether every component in
a package must work correctly when that package is installed and its
dependencies satisfied [0].
An appropriate comparison would probably be to dpkg-preconfigure and its
dependency on apt-utils while debconf only Recommends: apt-utils. The
error message isn't as abrupt as cardinfo's, perhaps, but it's still
the same "problem".
Personally, I don't see the value in trying to make this some sort of
hard and fast rule: having either of the above programs in separate
packages isn't likely to make anyone's life easier, and quite frankly
I'd much rather go with the maintainers' judgements than lintian's.
Of course, my thoughts on this sort of thing are on record in bug 102213,
I suppose.
Cheers,
aj
[0] Although there are two provisos you could add to this. One is to limit
which bits need to be functional: eg, examples of hooking two
separate programs together in /usr/share/doc are probably okay
to have installed even if only one of the two programs is; and
modules in /usr/lib/foo/ that're activated precisely when some other
program/library is available is probably reasonable too. So you could
only decide to care about programs in the various bin/ directories,
and directly in /lib or /usr/lib.
The other escape that's probably necessary, for an ultra-strict
reading, is things that can't be satisfied by simply installing
other software. So just because iptables can only be used on 2.4.x
kernels shouldn't mean we have to have some special uninstaller
in /etc/init.d for machines that dual boot, or similar. (Ditto for
missing displays, or the lack of PCMCIA hardware, or kernels without
a module built in, or similar)
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
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-- Mike Hoye,
see http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/armadillos.txt
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