On Tue, Aug 18, 2020 at 05:41:26PM +0200, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote: > As I explained, it's a matter of bootstrappability. Your package is not a leaf > package which is why this particular problem cannot be ignored. Helmut Grohne > (CC'ed) who is also working on keeping Debian bootstrappable will also be > able to explain this problem to you. > > Keeping Debian bootstrappable is important as it allows the whole system to be > bootstrapped from scratch with merely the sources available. Since pandoc is > a package which requires a large number of packages to be built before it > can be built itself, your package becomes a blocker when bootstrapping Debian > which is something that needs to be avoided.
I understand the overall problem and I do think that Debian being bootstrappable is a worthy and meaningful goal for what it's worth! I'm not sure whether the package not being a leaf has that much to do with it. Honestly, I feel like blaming libmaxminddb for bootstrappability issues is a bit odd. The chain I think is: isc-dhcp-client(?) -> bind9 -> libmaxminddb -> pandoc -> <bunch of Haskell> with Haskell being particularly hard to bootstrap. Did I get that right? All that said, I don't want to be an obstacle here and would be happy to help, as long as what we end up doing makes overall sense :) > As for 12.1, there is already git-man which contains the packages for the > manpages > for git. And since 12.1 is a recommendation and not a requirement, I do not > think > how your argument holds up. Especially, since this simple change unbreaks an > important > requirement in Debian. git-man has 171 manpages and is multiple megabytes in size. That's not comparable in the slightest with libmaxminddb which 2 manpages that are 10KB combined. I disagree that splitting off its two manpages into a separate package is the reasonable thing to do here, I'm afraid. Regards, Faidon
