Re: Depends/Recommends from libraries
Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:
> Adam Borowski writes ("Depends/Recommends from libraries"):
>> I'd like to discuss (and then propose to -policy) the following rule:
>>
>> # Libraries which don't provide a convenient means of conditionally loading
>> # at runtime (this includes most libraries for languages such as C), SHOULD
>> # NOT declare a "Depends:" or "Recommends:" relationship, directly or
>> # indirectly, on packages containing anything more than dormant files.
>> # Those include, among others, daemons, executables in $PATH, etc. Any such
>> # relationship should be instead declared by programs that use the library
>> # in question -- it is up to them to decide how important the relationship
>> # is.
> This seems like a non-brainer to me. Can anyone come up with a reason
> why this would be wrong in general ?
> Of course there may be exceptions, but you're proposing a SHOULD.
Policy doesn't have an RFC 2119 SHOULD. A Policy "should" means that
something is generally a bug, just not an RC one. It would be nice to
have the equivalent of SHOULD ("this is normally not a good idea but may
be the correct thing to do in specific situations"), but we don't
currently have that.
This would definitely declare lots of existing packages buggy, which is
something we normally try not to do because usually packages are doing
this for some good reason (and I think that's obviously the case here).
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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