severity 395166 wishlist
retitle 395166 dh_installdebconf: Should try to figure out the debconf version
needed
thanks
Joey Hess <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> If your package depends on a feature that's only in a new version of
> debconf, you should explicitly add a dependency on that version of
> debconf.
Of course, this is what we have done.
> Ideally, it should be ORed with the version of cdebconf that
> provides the same feature. Although, if you leave that out, we can
> always go back and fix it later. For example, look at tasksel, which
> depends on debconf (>= 1.5.5) | cdebconf (>= 0.106) for the Choices-C
> feature.
>
> dh_installdebconf's misc:Depends setting is only a lowest common
> denominator dependency, it can't deal with all cases.
Still it would be much better if it would somehow use a better version
for the Depends. First of all, I think many people are not aware of the
problem, and it would be less error prone if ${misc:Depends} wouldn't
contain a (somewhat) arbitrary version number. In other words: The
current versioned dependency gives a false feeling of security.
Second, it gives very ugly Depends lines:
Depends: ucf, debconf (>= 0.5) | debconf-2.0, debconf (>= 1.4.69) | debconf-2.0
In this case, we could just omitt the ${misc:Depends} - but that defeats
its purpose, namely that I do not need to check which dependencies are
introduced by my dh_* calls.
Regards, Frank
--
Dr. Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
