On 2024-10-17 21:30, Philippe Cerfon wrote:
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.
I feel like that would generate more frustration than installing
appstream by default.
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.
Appstream really is about metadata and it's super useful for automated
menu creation and such. If you've ever installed a package with a GUI
and see it pop in your DE's menu, that's how it's done. DEP-11 aimed to
do this before Appstream took over.
I don't really think we make sure it works in Debian for reasons related
to alternative package management, although some other projects might.
In any case, looking at the apt integration [1], it seems very
unobtrusive. Barring more substantial arguments against installing
appstream by default, I would be inclined to closing this bug as "wontfix".
[1]:
https://salsa.debian.org/pkgutopia-team/appstream/-/blob/debian/master/contrib/apt-conf/50appstream
--
⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀
⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Louis-Philippe Véronneau
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋ po...@debian.org / veronneau.org
⠈⠳⣄
