Hi Matthew, On Sat, Jan 07, 2023 at 05:06:50PM +0000, Matthew Vernon wrote: > Sandro, would you be opposed to relaxing the Depends: to a Recommends: ? If > you would be opposed, would you mind briefly explaining why, please?
I think this question was already posed by Simon McVittie and Sandro's answer was: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=945824#59 | numpy provides compiled extensions for all supported python3 versions, | so it has to depend on all of them since an extension compiled for 3.8 | (as an example) needs to have a 3.8 runtime environment available to | be able to be imported and used; and so for all the other versions. | this is by design and wont change. Ralf Jung and Vincent Lefevre weren't totally convinced given this answer, but there is no further followup from Sandro. I am also unconvinced by this reasoning, because extensions do not usually depend on the relevant interpreters. However, Sandro also noted that the objected dependency is likely rooted elsewhere: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=945824#12 | this is likely an artifact of shipping f2py3.7 and f2py3.8 with a | shebang referring directly to a versioned interpreter. that's always | been the case with multiple interpreters. Given a Recommends, we'd likely have to wrap these scripts in a way that produces a useful error message. Has anyone seen a patch for making this happen? Joachim, would you volunteer to write one? I would also like to compare this to how we handle things in other areas. A common complaint of users is that gcc tends to become huge every once in a while. This is due to new gcc versions being initially packaged unstripped in order to make ICEs debuggable from build logs. In a stable release, they're always be stripped as expected. So this size increase just affects the transition period. Thus far, we have tolerated this behaviour of gcc. At this time, I see: * A maintainer having given a reason for an unpopular packaging choice. * No convincingly good proposal for alternative behaviours (e.g. Recommends would yield bad error messages as is) and no satisfactory patch. * Prior art for similar behaviour. Helmut
