Re: Feaping Creature-ism in core Debian Packages
On Mon, Aug 30, 1999 at 03:44:08PM -0400, Dale Scheetz wrote:
> Why are we sticking calls to perl routines into a rules file in the first
> place?
Because vanilla sh using only calls to dpkg-deb for packaging purposes gives
me a sour stomach. Really, why do something so massochistic when a similar
makefile using debhelper requires 10x less code?
Is it OK for us to be lazy if that laziness allows a source depend on a
*core* item to become somewhat common? You speak of perl's instability, but
source builds aren't exactly as crucial as package installations, and many
fairly important packages pre-depend on perl. Is this heretical?
If I were in your shoes I wouldn't care about the perl dependency, but the
texi2html dependency. This is the less urgent. But there's another problem
assuming you propose at-package-installation document translation: you've
just added a gamut of pre-depends to almost all complex packages. This will
certainly miff some Debian users. In addition, document translators are
often more finicky about their environment (phase of the moon, minor
version...) than perl.
On a side note, I've come across a number of packages that (seemingly)
needlessly declare a dependency on X; maybe I just haven't researched the
situation. However, it seems to me that with sufficient twiddling, tetex
could stop depending on the base X libs.
--
..Aaron Van Couwenberghe... ..vanco@sonic.net.. ..aaronv@debian.org....
Berlin: http://www.berlin-consortium.org
Debian GNU/Linux: http://www.debian.org
There are three kinds of people in this world: those who can count and
those who can't.
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