Re: Bug#758234: transitive dependencies
On 13/11/14 09:59, Matthias Urlichs wrote:
> I'd like to suggest the following Policy change to fix the "depend
> on packages with lower dependencies" non-problem.
>
> This does simplify current practice, but unfortunately not Policy
> itself, as adhering to policy shouldn't allow you to break
> debootstrap. :-P
Seconded. I think this describes current practice, and it seems a lot
less make-work than asking the ftp-masters to propagate priorities
along transitive dependency relationships so that libraries comply
with Policy, then teaching tools like debootstrap to ignore those
libraries' priorities because actually we don't want to install them
after all if the important thing that depends on them was excluded[1] :-)
If people want to monitor which packages are transitively
required/important/standard and "raise red flags" if that set gets too
large, that's great, but it seems to me that instead of the current
situation:
* a cron job (debcheck) complains when priorities are not consistent
* optionally, people who like this aspect of Policy open bugs
* maintainers cannot do anything about the inconsistent priority
except asking the ftp-masters to change it
* people who are interested in whether a package is transitively
important look at its Priority, then check for any pending
priority changes that have not yet been acted on
a better way to achieve the same result with fewer steps and more
automation would be:
* a cron job (jenkins.debian.net?) installs the required, important,
standard sets (which is something we probably want to test anyway)
* people who are interested in whether a package is transitively
important look at what was installed by that cron job
Regards,
S
[1] e.g. debootstrap --exclude=aptitude should not have libxapian22,
and debootstrap --exclude=systemd-sysv --include=sysvinit-core
(if that worked - I think it's currently broken by #668001)
should ideally not have systemd or libcryptsetup4
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