reassign 339835 ifupdown retitle 339835 please do not build-depend on gawk, use awk instead thanks
Brian M. Carlson writes: > either nowebm must Conflict: original-awk or use awk and only > those features that are available in an "old" awk. No, that's not true. Every awk in Debian, including original-awk, is a "new awk". The "original" in original-awk, means it's the "one true awk", the implementation from the original Unix (the upstream author for this awk is Brian Kernighan). It does NOT mean it's not a "new awk". It has ARGC and all the things a "new awk" is supposed to have. Joey Hess writes: > This bug can be fixed simply by making noweb depend on gawk, which > provides the nawk program via alternatives. Maybe, but that would not be the right thing to do. A build-dependency on a package is gratuitous if you can use instead an essential package. In this case, neither mawk or gawk are essential, but awk is. As awk is essential, the right fix would be to use awk. Not mawk, not gawk, and not nawk. Joey Hess writes: > mawk is required, so it will always be installed No, a required package may only be assumed to be always installed (as far as build-dependencies is concerned) if it's "Essential: yes". mawk is required, but it's not "Essential: yes". Instead, awk is "virtually essential" (as base-files depends on awk), so it's /usr/bin/awk what you can assume it will always exist. It is very unfortunate that "virtual-package-names-list" speaks about nawk, for several reasons: a) POSIX already requires /usr/bin/awk to be a "new awk", so we should probably standarize around /usr/bin/awk and forget about nawk. b) nawk is probably the best name for original-awk, but original-awk may not be named nawk because it's already taken. It should not be. c) Making original-awk to provide nawk would make nawk essential de-facto, with the same level of "essentialness" as awk. If we want to standarize around awk (as probably POSIX requires), we should not make nawk essential. Thanks. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
