-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- [ This was: Bug#13849: netstd should predepend on libreadlineg2 ]
[ I would like to appeal to the technical comittee here. Unfortunately the technical comittee does not exist yet and all we have so far is debian-devel. Therefore we will have to discuss it here again ]. Summary: In a bo system, I managed to upgrade netstd without installing libreadlineg2 first and the simple ftp client stopped working. This is a really bad situation I really do not desire to anybody. This should not have happened if netstd would have a Pre-Depends line on libreadlineg2 (and libc6 & ncurses also, probably). * On a system which is remotely administered, if for any reason the usual installing method fails (dselect and libnet-perl and such), it is very important to have an alternate method to fix the problem (as usual in Unix, you may do things in several ways). * The Murphy's law says that if dselect/libnet-perl is the *only* method that is always guaranteed to work and because of that we decide that no Pre-Depends is needed for netstd, then it is 100% sure that a lot of users (it happened to me!) will find that dselect/libnet-perl fails and will not find an alternate method to fix the problem. Probably the system is also 100Km away from where you are. * The total set of Pre-Depends targets is small (most Pre-Depends are on libc6, ncurses3.4). bash already Pre-Depends on libreadlineg2. Adding one more Pre-Depends on libreadlineg2 for netstd would not make a great harm. Not adding a Pre-Depends on libreadlineg2 *could* actually make a great harm. * netstd is not essential, not even required, but for people that really have netstd installed, netstd is *very* important. In short I think that the addition of this simple Pre-Depends field will make the libc5 to lib6 upgrade *much* more robust. Perhaps people doing the upgrade by using the mini-howto or autoup.sh will not notice it (no harm with these extra Pre-Depends), but people doing the upgrade by using dselect will certainly notice it (possible harm, which we can avoid, and therefore should avoid). So I repeat the question I formulated one month ago: Please, tell me how much harm does to add a Pre-Depends field on libc6, ncurses3.4 and libreadlineg2 for netstd. I can tell you how much inconvenience does *not* to add it and then we can make a comparison between those two inconveniences. Thanks. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3ia Charset: latin1 iQCVAgUBNTZtvyqK7IlOjMLFAQH4owP+If+vI6TuUHt5q4mBG7gJWiHvVobl2zfi ufW7W6Nrcdo8RdLfOXBt/l1SqhmlxbkiK3yn4pEkR5jU3YTtoEy7SLKAbdVg+f/Y Mb2RBCwzzXhXV06wavi1HAjzo0OJkZ1KQRIKRTqqcD4grGMBPC9My0nRYoppIsST 3FP2cOx4624= =lYLS -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
