On 04.11.2012 21:09, Alexander Wirt wrote: > a2x supports several formats and I decided that all of them should be > fullfilled only by recommends. If you want to use a2x you may have to adjust > your build-deps. Afair asciidoc itself doesn't use xmllint, so the recommends > is correct here. This change was done some time ago especially for those guys > using asciidoc in build-depends. In the past all output formats of a2x were > supported in Depends which led to an enormous dependency chain. Therefore I > changed it, and I don't plan to revert the change.
Well, but as it looks to me, this essentially means that /nobody/ can use asciidoc conversions as is because most/all depend on some third party package, without digging yourself what third party packages are used. This means that maintainers need knowledge of internal implementation details of asciidoc. That's an unfortunate situation and people need to debug the very same issues over and over, and find their own workarounds in their packages to it. I suppose the rationale is mostly that asciidoc otherwise has huge build dependencies. Why don't you provide some meta packages to depend on instead then? Let's call them asciidoc-man, asciidoc-latex and so on, and provide them in your source package. They can be empty and people could depend on asciidoc-man instead, which in turn would Depend: asciidoc, other-stuff-required-for-man-conversion That would make us all happy, and you could still keep the default in recommends for the asciidoc package itself. -- with kind regards, Arno Töll IRC: daemonkeeper on Freenode/OFTC GnuPG Key-ID: 0x9D80F36D
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