Hi. On Thu, Oct 17, 2024 at 3:53 PM Louis-Philippe Véronneau <po...@debian.org> wrote: > I'm not sure not issuing tags based on the presence of optional > dependencies is a good idea. I think it would lead to confusion and > output reproducibility problems.
Would that still be a problem if lintian would just exit with a general error in case appstream was about to be invoked but not present? Debian does something like that already with program in the devscripts package, where many of them depend on packages which devscripts only recommends. So if someone actually wants to check a package with lintian that makes use of appstream metadata and if appstream is not installed, lintian could just generally fail before doing any further checks. That should make things reproducible, I guess. But people which don't use appstream in their packages could then still install and use lintan without appstream. > Lintian itself doesn't need to be installed on a dev's system directly Sure, but it's quite handy. Not only for DDs but also people who package stuff that never makes it into Debian. > What kind of issues having appstream installed on a system creates? I'm generally rather skeptical about systems like flatpack/snap/appimage that substitute/circumvent Debian’s true package management system (APT/dpkg). Sure appstream is mostly about metadata, but it seems conceptually related to the former. In the end, APT/dpkg work without appstream just fine, so ideally there should be no need to install it. Regards, Philippe.
