Hi,
Trying to upgrade a woody system to sarge, I experienced problems
upgrading libgtk2.0-0, and discovered that this packages was
self-depending. Afetr forcing the upgrade with "dpkg -i --force-depends",
everything went smoothly. So I filed a bug against libgtk2.0-0.
Then I discovered that I could upgrade this package from woody to sarge
with no trouble in a clean pbuilder chroot. So the problem might me more
complex.
However, from this bug report began a discussion with Loic Minier about
self-dependencies and circular dependencies.
Readibg policy 7.2, I see:
"
Depends
This declares an absolute dependency. A package will not be
configured unless all of the packages listed in its Depends field
have been correctly configured.
"
My understanding is that a self-depending package must be configured
before it can be configured, which makes it unconfigurable, and hence
uninstallable. And I think the same reasoning can be applied to
circular dependencies. But Loic disagrees.
What is the opinion of others? Shouldn't policy be more explicit about
circular (and self) dependencies?
Moreover, I just wrote a small python script that looks for
self-dependencies in sarge, and found those packages:
libtabe2
libtextwrap1
gnustep-back
libbonoboui2-0
libgail-common
libbonobo2
libgtk2.0-0
Should a bug be filed against those packages?
Cheers,
Nicolas
PS: please CC your replies to me, as I am currently quite unable to
track debian-devel. (MFT set accordingly)
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