Re: Bug#221523: Causes build failures

[Florent Rougon <f.rougon@free.fr>]

Junichi Uekawa <dancer@netfort.gr.jp> wrote:

>> > The configure script is checking for 'python' script.
>> > 
>> > What was the original reason for the 'recommends' instead of 
>> > 'depends'? It's not really clear to me.
>> 
>> some people wanted to be able to keep the default python version at
>> version 2.2, but install packages from unstable, when the default
>> versions were different in testing and unstable.
>
> I do doubt such special needs should be forced upon all of 
> us.

I am not the one who asked for this change, but I do find a somewhat
strange to have pythonX.Y depend on python (along with the inverse
dependency, which looks normal to me). I also think that a package
(build-)?depending on pythonX.Y specifically should call pythonX.Y
specifically.

If the configure script hard-codes the check for python (instead of
pythonX.Y), why not (in the present case, where X.Y is 2.3) build-depend
on "python (>= 2.3)" and, if necessary, on "python-dev (>= 2.3)" (cf.
http://people.debian.org/~joss/python/python-policy-draft.html/ap-build_dependencies.html)?

-- 
Florent