On Mon, 18 Apr 2022 13:45:28 -0700 Steve Langasek <steve.langa...@canonical.com> wrote:
The macaulay2-common package has a versioned dependency on base-files that is generated by dh_linktree. This is because debian/macaulay2-common.linktrees generates links to usr/share/common-licenses/ that are then resolved to a dependency.- You do not have to depend on base-files, this package is essential. - The only time you need to depend on an essential package is if you have a versioned dependency. However, in this case the versioned dependency is itself wrong; dh_linktree is generating a >= versioned dependency against the version of base-files that is currently installed at build time, but that version is arbitrary and is not an indication of the minimum version required (GPL-2 and GPL-3 are not new). - You should not in general need to make symlinks to the license files. All packages have their license information available in the standard location of /usr/share/doc/$package/copyright, as this package does. We noticed this in Ubuntu because an upload of base-files triggered a run of macaulay2's autopkgtests, which take a long time to run and are irrelevant to a base-files update. Please drop these links, and with them the gratuitous versioned dependency.
Thanks for the report! I'd added the symlinks because the Macaulay2 documentation includes these license files, and this seemed like a slightly easier solution to shipping redundant copies of the GPL than patching the documentation itself. I didn't think about the repercussions of using dh_linktrees to do this! I'll upload a new version soon with a fix. Doug
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