Re: Bug#383958: lintian: python-script-but-no-python-dep error with python-support
Pierre Habouzit <madcoder@debian.org> writes:
> python-support is written in python (same is true for python-central)
> and will *always* depend upon 'python'
Maybe some examples to illustrate will help. It may not be entirely clear
why the above statement doesn't actually resolve the problem.
Suppose that, due to some changes to how byte-compiling is done for Python
3.0, it's necessary to write the script in python-support to require
Python 3.0. It therefore might depend on python3.0 instead of python, and
hence wouldn't cause a /usr/bin/python to be installed.
Suppose that with Python 4.0, the python-support script, still written in
Python, makes sense to distribute as an executable compiled to native code
and therefore depending on Python libraries but not needing an interpreter
at all.
You can decide that installing python-support is a way to get a
/usr/bin/python interpreter, but there's no inherent reason why this
should be the case. Furthermore, I don't think that's actually the right
approach. It adds complexity to dependency analysis without really
gaining anything.
Let me turn this around: what advantage is there to the current approach?
Why would you ever want a package containing a Python script to depend on
python-support and *not* python? Is this just saving eight bytes in the
Depends field, and if so, is that really worth it for, say, not being able
to locate all packages that depend on Python by simply looking for
packages that depend on Python (rather than having to also factor in
packages that use transitive dependencies)?
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: