Package: fence-agents Version: 4.15.0-3 Severity: important Hi,
the fence-agents package in current testing/unstable looks like this: | % apt-cache show fence-agents | Package: fence-agents | Version: 4.15.0-3 | Installed-Size: 13 | Maintainer: Debian HA Maintainers <debian-ha-maintain...@alioth-lists.debian.net> | Architecture: all | Recommends: fence-agents-ack-manual, fence-agents-aliyun, fence-agents-alom, fence-agents-apc, fence-agents-apc-snmp, fence-agents-bladecenter, fence-agents-brocade, fence-agents-cdu, fence-agents-cisco-mds, fence-agents-cisco-ucs, fence-agents-crosslink, fence-agents-cyberpower-ssh, fence-agents-docker, fence-agents-drac, fence-agents-drac5, fence-agents-dummy, fence-agents-eaton-snmp, fence-agents-eaton-ssh, fence-agents-ecloud, fence-agents-emerson, fence-agents-eps, fence-agents-hds-cb, fence-agents-heuristics-ping, fence-agents-hpblade, fence-agents-ibmblade, fence-agents-ibm-powervs, fence-agents-ibm-vpc, fence-agents-ibmz, fence-agents-ifmib, fence-agents-ilo2, fence-agents-ilo-moonshot, fence-agents-ilo-mp, fence-agents-ilo-ssh, fence-agents-intelmodular, fence-agents-ipdu, fence-agents-ipmilan, fence-agents-kdump, fence-agents-kubevirt, fence-agents-ldom, fence-agents-lindy-pdu, fence-agents-lpar, fence-agents-mpath, fence-agents-netio, fence-agents-ovh, fence-agents-ovm, fence-agents-powerman, fence-agents-pve, fence-agents-raritan, fence-agents-raritan-px3, fence-agents-rcd-serial, fence-agents-redfish, fence-agents-rhevm, fence-agents-rsa, fence-agents-rsb, fence-agents-sanbox2, fence-agents-scsi, fence-agents-skalar, fence-agents-vbox, fence-agents-virsh, fence-agents-vmware, fence-agents-vmware-rest, fence-agents-vmware-soap, fence-agents-vmware-vcloud, fence-agents-wti, fence-agents-xenapi, fence-virt | Suggests: fence-agents-amt, fence-agents-aws, fence-agents-azure-arm, fence-agents-compute, fence-agents-gce, fence-agents-ironic, fence-agents-openstack, fence-agents-sbd | Description-en: Fence Agents for Red Hat Cluster - all agents | Red Hat Fence Agents is a collection of scripts to handle remote power | management for several devices. They allow failed or unreachable nodes to be | forcibly restarted and removed from the cluster. | . | This package is a metapackage depending on all available fence agents. | [...] The fence-agents package itself is "empty": | % dpkg -L fence-agents | /. | /usr | /usr/share | /usr/share/doc | /usr/share/doc/fence-agents | /usr/share/doc/fence-agents/changelog.Debian.gz | /usr/share/doc/fence-agents/copyright And the package does *not* depend on all available fence agents, they are only recommends. I'm aware that folks disabling Recommends are supposed to know what they are doing. But at least in my experience avoiding Recommends is a common practice esp. amongst server systems where fence-agents has its use case. And if someone is upgrading fence-agents from bookworm (v4.12.1-1) to trixie (v4.15.0-3) and isn't aware of this fence-agents Recommends situation *upfront*, the system will end up with this empty / broken fence-agents situation. Even `apt-get install --reinstall --install-recommends fence-agents` doesn't behave as someone might expect, so AFAICT there's no easy way out of this situation then. IMO the fence-agents should: a) at least depend on fence-agents-common, and: b) a "fence-agents-all" package which *actually* depends on *all* agent packages could further mitigate this situation (the fence-agents package itself then could use fence-agents-all in its Recommends). regards -mika-
