On Wed, Feb 02, 2005 at 02:38:31AM +0100, Santiago Vila wrote: [...] > > debhelper -> po-debconf -> gettext -> libgcj4 > > > > [ snipped paragraph which talks about how bad this is ] > > Ok, this is my analysis of the above chain: > > Yes, I agree it's not nice (but not to the point of suggesting that > the old gettext package comes back). Let's see: The first "big" package > in the chain is gettext, which is already 4.7MB large. Clearly, po-debconf > should depend on it or in a similar package, since that's its main purpose. > The dependency of gettext on libgcj4 comes from dpkg-shlibdeps.
You are running dpkg-shlibdeps not only against usr/bin/* but also usr/lib/gettext/*, and the dependency on libgcj4 comes from gnu.gettext.DumpResource and gnu.gettext.GetURL which are not required to run gettext tools: I did not have a close look at gnu.gettext.DumpResource, but gnu.gettext.GetURL (which triggered #244215) is only used by /usr/lib/gettext/urlget. Now have a look at gettext-tools/src/urlget.c and you will see that the fetch() command tries several scenarios to download a file from an URL. For all except gnu.gettext.GetURL, it first checks whether the tool seems to work (here nothing is sent do stdout or stderr), and then perform the download with normal stdout and stderr so that problems can be reported. So #244215 is due to the fact that gnu.gettext.GetURL is run without first checking whether it can run. A fix is to let gnu.gettext.GetURL.main handle a --version option, and treat gnu.gettext.GetURL like other alternatives in the fetch() function. I will provide a patch if you are willing to go this way. A quick and dirty hack would be to move gnu.gettext.DumpResource and gnu.gettext.GetURL into another directory not checked by dpkg-shlibdeps, and set GETTEXTJEXEDIR accordingly when building gettext. > The dependencty of debhelper on po-debconf. > > Such dependency was added in October 2002, but at that time, > gettext was *already* quite big. > > Considering that not everybody who uses debhelper uses po-debconf, > the logical thing to do here, IMHO, to preserve granularity, would > have been not to add such dependency, but instead require that > packages which need po-debconf (a minority of them) add it > to their build-depends. The same argument applies against msginit, so you can replace this dependency by Recommands: libgcj4 | wget | lynx | curl or even drop the first one. Adding a w3m alternative in urlget.c would also be nice since this package is now of standard priority. Denis -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
