On Mon, 21 Apr 2025 01:34:56 +0300, Adrian Bunk <b...@debian.org> wrote: >On Sun, Apr 20, 2025 at 04:46:52PM -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote: >> Factual statements about one's run-time dependencies should be as >> decoupled from the details of the set of "Essential" packages as >> possible. One reason is that the identities of the people making these >> decisions are disjoint. Often a package maintainer lacks this power; >> except for dependencies they introduce through operation of their >> maintainer scripts (or Debian add-ons), such run-time dependencies are >> beyond their control. >>... > >While this might sound good in theory, in practice it would be horrible. > >As an example, libc6 has a preinst script that calls dpkg, sed, >grep and rm. > >Making these dependencies explicit would be something like > Pre-Depends: sh, dpkg, sed, grep, coreutils > >I would expect that such Pre-Depends cycles between essential packages >and libc6 will result in broken systems during upgrades.
I have always been less than a fan of not being allowed to declare dependency on bash or coreutils, but a (non-logical) tradeoff would be allowing to declare such dependencies, and liberally removing (or demoting) them if they cause a cycle. I don't expect that to happen too often. >And then there's the normal time-waste like "the package ships >a bash-completion file that uses awk, grep, sed and sort - that's >dependencies on four essential packages". I'd rather do that than having to spend hours updating year numbers in machine readable debian/copyright. Greetings Marc -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Marc Haber | " Questions are the | Mailadresse im Header Rhein-Neckar, DE | Beginning of Wisdom " | Nordisch by Nature | Lt. Worf, TNG "Rightful Heir" | Fon: *49 6224 1600402
