Re: git: Please consider demoting git-man to Recommends

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

reassign 948151 git 1:2.25.0~rc1-1
forcemerge 613892 948151
tags 613892 + upstream
quit

Hi,

Anatoly Pugachev wrote:

> clone of #613892 ?

Indeed it is!  Thanks for digging that up.

See that bug for details on what is needed to get this done (an
upstream patch teaching "git help" to cope with missing manpages).

John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
>> John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:

>>> Since Recommends are enabled by default in apt, this would still
>>> cause git-man to be installed on standard desktop installations
>>> when a user invokves "apt install git" but at the same time it
>>> would avoid installability problems as described in [1], especially
>>> for Debian Ports buildds which, for example, cannot build rustc
>>> at the moment because git is no installable [2].
[...]
> I would actually move it to Recommends as this will still result
> of git-man being installed on any regular system but the installation
> will not fail if the package is not available.
>
> Recommends is basically a Depends that can be turned off with "--no-recommends"
> which is exactly what the buildds are using.

Thanks for reporting it.  Interesting.

This is not what Recommends is for.  If we want to remove a dependency
in the buildd environment but not for users, we can use build profiles
for that instead.  Using Recommends to mean "Depends, except on
buildds" would produce bad results for end users that use
--no-recommends.

Are there any plans for debian-ports to host the relevant arch:all
packages?

Sincerely,
Jonathan