Package: gzip Version: 1.12-1.1 Severity: serious Justification: Policy 3.8 X-Debbugs-Cc: arraybo...@gmail.com
gzip is a package with priority "essential". It currently suggests the "less" package, which has priority "important". less is a hard dependency of zless - if it is not installed, zless will error out with "exec: less: not found". Section 3.8 of the Debian Policy Manual states "Packages may assume that functionality provided by essential packages is always available without declaring explicit dependencies...". This implies to me that essential packages must be fully functional in all respects without the installation of any additional dependencies beyond what the package itself declares, since this is the only way this assumption can hold true. Either gzip should promote "less" to a dependency, or zless should be split into a separate package that is not marked as essential. Given that zless is already part of gzip's functionality, I do not believe that splitting it out is an option because "any capability added to an essential package ... creates an obligation to support that capability as part of the Essential set in perpetuity." Reporting from an Ubuntu system, thus my system information shows Ubuntu information. I have checked the gzip packaging present in Salsa and verified that this is an issue with the latest packaging. -- System Information: Debian Release: trixie/sid APT prefers noble-updates APT policy: (500, 'noble-updates'), (500, 'noble-security'), (500, 'noble'), (100, 'noble-backports') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 6.8.0-45-kfocus (SMP w/16 CPU threads; PREEMPT) Kernel taint flags: TAINT_USER, TAINT_OOT_MODULE, TAINT_UNSIGNED_MODULE Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) LSM: AppArmor: enabled Versions of packages gzip depends on: ii dpkg 1.22.6ubuntu6.1 ii install-info 7.1-3build2 ii libc6 2.39-0ubuntu8.3 gzip recommends no packages. Versions of packages gzip suggests: ii less 590-2ubuntu2.1 -- no debconf information
