Bug#823348: Limit the strongest dependencies on supplemental -doc packages
[Please CC me on replies, as I didn't receive this mail, and just
happened to see it in the archives.]
On Mon, 22 Aug 2016 13:38:42 +0100 George Bateman <georgebateman16@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm currently making my first package, Processing. It's a GUI teaching
> tool for (usually Java) programming, with its own standard libraries
> for the code produced. It is currently split up into three packages:
> "processing" the GUI, "libprocessing3-java" the library, and
> "processing-doc" for documentation. It has the following dependency
> relationships:
>
> processing –Depends→ libprocessing3-java
> –Depends→ processing-doc
>
> libprocessing3-java –Sugggests→ processing-doc
>
> This would violate the proposed policy change, but for very good
> reason because no educational program is very effective without some
> documentation.
Policy defines "Recommends" as "packages that would be found together
with this one in all but unusual installations." That seems entirely
accurate here, and apt installs Recommends by default, so by default a
user who installed processing would get processing-doc.
Unless the processing GUI fails to run without its help files installed,
"Recommends" seems sufficient. Does processing fail to start because it
expects the help files to exist, or crash/misbehave without the help
files present?
If not, "Recommends" seems appropriate.
> To resolve such issues, I would amend the last sentence of the patch to
>
> + Otherwise,
> + <var>package</var> should declare at most a <tt>Recommends</tt> on
> + <var>package</var>-doc, unless <var>package</var>-doc is
> needed for the
> + practical use of <var>package</var>.
That doesn't seem like the right resolution to me.
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