On Tue, Sep 18, 2018 at 08:53:05PM +0200, Paul Gevers wrote: > Hi, > > On 18-09-18 17:21, gregor herrmann wrote: > > On Mon, 17 Sep 2018 15:11:30 -0700, Antonio Terceiro wrote: > > > >>> So if needs-recommends vanishes, there will be at least dozens if not > >>> hundreds of perl packages which will immediately fail their > >>> autopkgtests. > >> > >> Yes. We will need to find a replacement before dropping needs-recommends > >> completely.> > > Thanks. > > I think autodep8 (which is doing the work for these perl packages) must > be fixed before we can remove needs-recommends. It should already add > the recommends to the test dependencies. (but see my comments below). > > >> Maybe we want autopkgtest to also support @recommends@ alongside > >> @builddeps@? > > > > From a user's point of view, that sounds ok to me. > > Updating a few bits of documentation and a handful of packages with > > manual d/t/control shouldn't be a problem. > > On the one hand, I wonder what that is going to help. This is just > changing semantics as it still means that autopkgtest needs to figure it > out. The current situation is going to waste peoples time debugging why > a test is a regression, just to find out that every tool is silent on > not installing the recommends. On the other hand, it is a clearer > statement and it means that we can explain and document what we really > mean with it. > > @recommends@ or needs-recommends should mean that direct recommends of > the binary packages from the package that provides the autopkgtest are > test dependencies. Implementation wise, this would mean that we would > add all recommends, whether the binary that recommends it is installed > or not. > > If the feature to have recommends in the test dependencies isn't going > away, how bad would it be if we change the behavior in a sustainable > way? In my endeavors to fix this bug, I have missed the option to just > add the sum of all the Recommends lines to the test dependencies, like > we do with @builddeps@. What do people think?
That would work as well, with the benefit that it would require changing only autopkgtest and nothing else. And I think that adding the packages in Recommends to test dependencies is compatible with the original spirit of needs-recommends, which is "this test needs the recommended packages installed", but does it in a way that actually works.
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