Re: A plan to get rid of unnecessary package dependencies

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Christian Aichinger <Greek0@gmx.net> wrote:

> As Steve Langasek detailed in his d-d-a mail[1], unnecessary
> dependencies cause lots of problems, as they make transitions
> bigger then they need to be.
>
> The root cause are unnecessary libraries on the linker commandline,
> which get stored in the resulting binary and which dpkg-shlibdeps
> happily turns into inter-package dependencies.
>
[...]
> A summary of the possible causes for errors and some hints for
> fixing them are here:
> http://rerun.lefant.net/checklib/howto-fix-errors.html

As one could expect, tetex-bin and texlive-base-bin are among the
packages with extra dependencies.  This is most likely an upstream
issue, it's not urgent, but we should probably investigate it.

There's one strange thing, though:

$ readelf -d /usr/bin/pdftex | grep jpeg
 0x00000001 (NEEDED)                     Shared library: [libjpeg.so.62]
$ readelf -d /sid/usr/bin/pdftex | grep jpeg
$ 

The first is tetex-bin, the second texlive-base-bin, and the jpeg
dependency of tetex is identified as a "problem", i.e. a superfluous
dependency.  I always assumed that pdftex is supposed to use libjpeg to
include jpeg files, but obviously this is untrue:

~/src/Packages/tetex-bin/tetex-bin-3.0$ ./configure --help | egrep -i 'jpg|jpeg'
~/src/Packages/tetex-bin/tetex-bin-3.0$ 

So how do we get that?

Regards, Frank

-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)