Re: Adding lzma to dpkg's Pre-Depends

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

Hi,

Summary of the thread starting at:

  <http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/04/msg00003.html>

The only valid concerns rised in that thread were from Anthony, and I
think I gave reasons to dismiss them (found below).

The rest were concerning policy decisions on when to use lzma
compression, which are not relevant to this particular decision.

So, I'd like to ask the Release Team, if it would be fine with you to
add such Pre-Depends for the next dpkg upload targetting lenny.


On Wed, 2008-04-09 at 06:18:36 +0300, Guillem Jover wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-04-02 at 14:01:16 +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> > On Tue, Apr 01, 2008 at 08:05:06AM +0300, Guillem Jover wrote:
> > > As per policy 3.5 I'm bringing this up here. I'd like to add lzma to
> > > dpkg's Pre-Depends, so that we can use lzma compressed packages after
> > > lenny w/o having to add an lzma Pre-Depends on each .deb package
> > > compressed that way.
> > 
> > Hrm. Alternatively, the packages _do_ pre-depend on lzma though; and
> > you're aiming to avoid that by making lzma Essential:yes -- in the same
> > way packages that pre-depend on perl or bash don't need an explicit
> > dependency.
> 
> Well not really Essential, it's going to be pulled like that yes, but
> other derivatives, might want to disable it. And I agree with Chris that
> it makes sense for dpkg to Pre-Depend on lzma as it's the one calling
> it, and that's an internal implementation detail, in case there's a
> liblzma in the future and we'd switch to using it, packages should not
> require to be changed.
> 
> > libz and libbz2 are both included statically;
> 
> Switching to dynamic linking is something I've been pondering for some
> time, but that's independent of this discussion, and something not to
> be changed at this point of the release anyway.
> 
> > would it make more sense to do the same thing with the lzma (ie,
> > copy the binary into /usr/lib/dpkg), instead of making lzma
> > essential?
> 
> The lzma package is tiny, it could be halved as I pointed out in the
> bug report (should probably just file bug reports on lzma for that).
> That would imply an installed size of about 150 KiB, 100 of those
> are just the lzma binary. In that case I don't really see the gain
> in having mostly the package there but w/o it being handled by the
> packaging system.

I filed that bug and it was fixed some time ago, lzma in testing and
unstable uses around 130 KiB on i386. So I don't think the size
argument should really be a problem now.

thanks,
guillem