Colin Watson <cjwat...@ubuntu.com> writes: > We're shipping lintian on Ubuntu CD images as a Recommends of aptdaemon, > in order to do some basic sanity checks on third-party binary packages. > Unfortunately this pulls in dpkg-dev and its dependencies, which are > rather heavyweight. Some analysis shows that the only thing that we > need dpkg-dev for is to unpack source packages, so it's possible to > check binary packages without dpkg-dev.
> The attached patch checks whether dpkg-source is available and produces > a better error message; it then drops dpkg-dev to a Suggests so that we > don't have to ship it. I don't think this should particularly > negatively affect anyone - if you're building packages, you have > dpkg-dev installed anyway, and probably not solely by means of > installing lintian - but I thought I'd file a bug about it rather than > just committing it so that we could discuss it in case anyone had any > objections. Hurm. I have to admit that this doesn't make me particularly happy, since checking source packages seems like a fundamental action of Lintian. The use of dpkg-dev in Lintian seems to meet the Policy definition of at *least* Recommends fairly clearly, and Suggests feels much too weak when we lose that basic of functionality. On the other hand, I have no alternative solution to your particular problem; the Recommends list of dpkg-dev is indeed rather heavy, since it includes build-essential. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
