On 11/10/2024 12:03, Helmut Grohne wrote:
On Fri, Oct 11, 2024 at 10:46:47AM +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:
Hi. Earlier this year I was asked [#1072021] to remove
Recommends: ... system-log-daemon
from one of my packages. There are some explanations here:
[0]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2024/05/msg00425.html
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2024/05/msg00436.html
The effect of making this change is that on non-systemd systems,
nothing pulls in a syslog daemon and no logging takes place.
This seems wrong.
I agree that the proposed solution is less than ideal.
Likewise (and I see some strength in the argument that stopping anything
from depending on system-log-daemon is a policy change even if the
system-log-daemon remains as only a thing that things Provide: and
Conflicts:).
Either the reference is wrong or the attribution should be Simon
Richter. The proposal is to update system-log-daemon dependencies to
"systemd-sysv | system-log-daemon" and that is something that cover the
relevant use cases of running systemd-only, sysvinit with
system-log-daemon and systemd with forwarding to a system-log-daemon. It
feels a bit annoying to have to encode systemd-sysv here, but on a
technical level, that's what we want to express here. I fear what is
required here is design work.
That isn't obviously a terrible answer in my view; as I see it the
objection is that doing so means that container images may end up
pulling in an unnecessary syslog package. I don't think that's the end
of the world (it's a couple of MB at most), but I can see that a
solution that avoided this would have merit.
Hippotat Recommends: system-log-daemon, however, so presumably if one
were putting it into a minimal image, one would not be pulling in
Recommends: willy-nilly in any case.
My feeling is, I think, therefore, that packages should still be able to
Recommend (et al) system-log-daemon (since we do have sysvinit users of
Debian), and that Simon Richter's suggestion is a sensible way of
achieving that absent a neater solution that helps with the
container-building question.
Regards,
Matthew
