Jens Peter Secher wrote: > Well, I wrote the package with the main goal of being able to maintain > Debian packages under Mercurial and building them in clean > environments using pbuilder, and more over I think it is very > important that people actually use pbuilder
<off-topic> Yes, a check for missing Build-Depends with pbuilder or similar before an upload is important, but until an upload is imminent, I think using pbuilder is even a bad idea. Way too many packages have missing Build-Conflicts! And for some people --- e.g., me --- the final checks for upload happen on a different machine than development.) </off-topic> > Policy says: > > Recommends > This declares a strong, but not absolute, dependency. > The Recommends field should list packages that would be found > together with this one in all but unusual installations. I think you have misunderstood this. Recommends is not meant for recommending best practices or super-helpful addons but to install everything that is not strictly necessary but avoids breaking a package. For example, a libfoo-dev package should _not_ recommend Build-Essential because programs like "make", while part of any sane development setup, are not actually needed to make the package work as expected. And on the other hand, xmlto _does_ recommend a docbook-to-pdf toolchain because while that is not necessary for xmlto to be useful, it is necessary for xmlto to "just work" the way it is advertised to. In other words, a Recommends is not just a strong Suggests. In this particular case, anyone who wants to use pbuilder almost surely has it already installed. There would not be confusion or breakage from requiring it to be installed separately. > If you for > some reason will not install pbuilder, then no one /forces/ you to do > so. What exactly is the problem? Um, when I try to install mercurial-buildpackage, my package manager (correctly!) decides to pull in this other package I did not request at the same time. > But if more people seem to think that mercurial-buildpackage should > only suggest pbuilder, I will consider changing it. Well, it is your call. Why not just update the package description, so the statement "mercurial-buildpackage does not work as it is advertised to without pbuilder" becomes true? Thanks for the comments, Jonathan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
